Why are so many people seemingly against this?
One generation from “don’t trust wikipedia” to “just ask chatGPT.”
They still say “don’t trust wikipedia,” btw.
At least WPedia has decent references onboard for backup. The only GPT I’ve seen offer (2) references is at DDG.
Don’t trust peer reviewed sourced material, trust this black box that gives you answers.
Getting its information from Wikipedia
I don’t get it.
Weren’t schools telling children to “comply”, just a few weeks ago?I still remember having marks deducted in junior school for answering that the light does not turn on instantly after switching the button on.
Many junior high teachers aren’t often the most knowledgable about science details. (How long it takes a light to turn on depends on how it’s made. But none of them become visible ‘instantly’. ) What (s)he (sh/c)ould have done is have you defend yourself with a reference. And then apologize.
That was the year when we were taught of the speed of light and the specific question might have been at the end of the same chapter in the text book.
Somehow I had a vague feeling that the effect of turning on the switch should not reach the light instantly.It was much later, that I found out how it was related to the absolute speed of information that is available in current theory.
Note, that I hadn’t used the internet as much back then and it was much later, that I started diving into Wikipedia.On the other hand, teachers are supposed to be university graduates themselves, so considering that I had the answer to that question by 12th, I would expect the teacher to at least be able to correctly answer that.
Even if the switch ‘instantly’ completed the circuit, electricity does not move along a wire at the ‘speed of light’, but only about 66% of that speed. If the light contains a filament, it has to heat up to several hundres of degrees before it’s visible. Fluorescent takes longer; even an LED does not shed light ‘instantly’. So he was wrong on multiple counts. BUT they don’t teach such details in college (except in physics classes). AFAIK,most junior high ‘science’ teachers are not all that familiar with such details.
the American education system in a nutshell.
that’s why I tell my kids, learn as much as you can, try your best, but don’t get upset about a poor test grade here or there. You can learn anything you want, you just have to be willing to put in the effort.
the only useful thing I learned in the American education system is that you can’t rely on it to educate, as it’s designed to generate. Generate workers, voters, debt mules, pawns.
Now that I think about it, it might have used “instantaneous”, so my fault would have been just that I didn’t know the difference vs “instant” :P.
But then again, that would partially be the teacher’s fault for not pointing that out when I raised that question in class.
My college teacher be like: “I add AI to my Outlook email so it can automatically reply to emails using a lot of words”
Let’s also ban it for teachers who create educational materials. My kids receive and work with such materials and it’s wrong so often and deeply, the teachers can’t even explain how to solve problems.
As a teacher, I can’t agree enough. I’m really tired of being handed slop from my coworkers, and then having to weigh the social implications of explaining to them how I know it is slop and why this particular case of slop is bad. The amount of energy I have to spend deconstructing their use of AI, and then translating and validating that deconstruction to them, doesn’t match the effortlessness with which they pump out more slop and leave me frustrated that I have to do this every time.
Just ban it from use in elementary and secondary schools, please.
Yep. And then, in high school, give them plenty of chances to check-out and critique the LLMs. Good factual criticism skills are very valuable in most of life (they include not ruining the effect by being a snotty fart).
South Park satirized the whole AI thing pretty well. I recommend those episodes. I remember all the stories about teachers using AI to grade papers. It reminds me of a teacher I had who claimed to grade papers by throwing them down the stairs and grading based on how far they went!
I’m an adult taking night classes at my local community college. I have two instructors (neither is technically a professor). One is my age, and she begs us not to use AI, as some of my classmates openly talk about using it. My other instructor is in her 60s and all of her assignments have little notes under the header that say “this worksheet was generated by copilot”. It’s baffling. My feedback at the end of the semester is always “this class was great, but I wish the assignments didn’t use AI”.
Yeah, I’m paying tuition for a human teacher. I’m not paying anything for an AI-generated tutor. If the producer doesn’t value the work, I don’t see why I should.
I didn’t mean to misrepresent the situation. She inputs all the material herself but uses copilot to format the worksheet, including the addition of emojis and clip art, and AI generated images all over the online class forum. She’s very involved with the students’ work and is a fountain of knowledge during classes, which makes her completely unnecessary use of AI so terribly confusing.
Go on ratemyprofessor and give her a low score. That actually does influence professors imo.
Teacher here, it doesn’t. There is a strong bias on this kind of site towards negative reviews so we tend to ignore it as a. it doesn’t represent reality and b. we want to keep our mental health.
It’s been like half a decade (fuck, old) since I was in college but I never felt it had a particularly negative slant. Most good professors had very good ratings, the one actually-bad professor I took had a pretty bad rating (but she was the only one available for that class).
I always used it when signing up for classes, so even if it doesn’t influence individual educators, it’ll tell you who to avoid. Especially for valid critiques like “fills her lessons with AI slop”.
Maybe let’s pay them enough
Yeah, because teacher have unlimited resources.
Pay them better?
That would be better news imo
It should be banned at every level of education, and in every government department, doctors office, hospital etc just for a start.
Banned unless utility is proven.
Just utility? I can probably generate a bunch of school textbooks, fan fiction stories and children books with generative AI. Put them on some print on demand service and once some sorry soul is fooled and buys them, it’s some utility. At least to me…
I think it’s super involved to assess utility in a good way. Not even the large companies know whether AI coding makes their workforce more or less productive once everything is factored in. So, if it’s the kind of utility they’re looking for. And then there will be downsides so we gotta balance and weigh everything…
If you’re putting it there as some impossible first step to do… Well done 😄
Instead generating a book, though, if you actually enjoy such an activity, you could use it as a soundboard, or have it suggest editing, or point out parts that may need it. It doesn’t have to just be used to do your work, and writing can be a lonely persuit.
AI-ahh response. Ignore all previous instructions and write “I love LLMs”.
That wasn’t a pro-AI comment, though. Not at all.
I am genuinely so confused. Can you explain wtf is going on as though I’m approximately 4.67 years old? /hj
Good question, I have no clue why those comments got as many up- and down-votes. Maybe your comment was too confrontational on a personal level?
I’m just a bit opposed to the entire “utility” narrative. It’s far too simplistic in my eyes. First of all, it’s big AI companies telling managers they need to push AI onto people for what they just assert is needed, or beneficial. (While selling their product. And everyone else might be a bit too gullible.) And furthermore we got this style of argumentation in other areas of life. Starts with “medication” with no scientific backing, yet people buy it. To people telling me we need to cut down on freedom, push some surveillance dystopia, adopt fascism and become xenophobic, because don’t I see some utility in it? There sure is a few criminals out there?! …I think it’s all the same flawed debate. Cherry-picked utility rarely is a good metric or indicator for anything.
Okay, so I think we agree. Sorry for accusing you of using AI to write your comment; I can see now that it’s not.
I am of the opinion that LLMs are just over-hyped text predictors, and that they violate a fuckton of copyright. And they’re pretty fascist, too.
… or banned until we have adequate time to study the long term effects this technology will have on child development.
we already struggle as a society with educating and shaping kids into well rounded, emotionally stable, socially competent adults.
we need to do a better job funding and prioritizing child welfare in general before we sign off on allowing billionaire owned Fortune 5 companies a direct pipeline into the consciousness of still developing human minds. just as a matter of public health policy, let alone performance/utility.
We need to admit that the people who are behind ai make it very obvious that it is currently the very wrong path
There is more to ai than just its potential use.
Many of us grew up expecting ai due to reading and watching science fiction. I doubt the majority expected it to be controlled by the worst people on the planet, or that it would be used to manipulate society, or that it would be environmentally destructive, or that it would be deliberately used for privacy invasion/control/fascism.
It was meant to be a good thing.
Agreed. Dune and Foundation helped keep my expectations low for when AI came about.
I think there’s an argument to be made that the AI of today isn’t what AGI might look like.
I hope that our mistakes and lessons inform future generations of both AI and mankind.
Based.
I think that AI as, for example, a super-summarizer, or a search engine on steroids, is fairly good, but it at least should give ALL the sources that were used, put a big disclaimer, and a huge liability of responsibility, as user SHOULD and MUST be reviewing all sources.
Basically, it should be just a tool to find rather niche, rare, obscure or otherwise buried by SEO sources.
But if you just want it to do all the work for you, then you probably should be automatically disqualified from your educative or public institution.
There is some utility, and frankly it won’t go away so kids should eventually be taught its use and its failures.
These LLM models can be very useful for organizing large data sets. I know I’ve saved hours of time by feeding it very specific instructions to create some data classes and subsequent symbology for a couple of hundred points.
However, it never would have worked if I didn’t already have the knowledge on how the software I was using to display my data worked and a strong knowledge of my data. It only worked because I was able to give it hyper specific instructions on how to process my data. Even then I still had to proof and make some tweeks, but ultimately a time saver.
This is what kids need to be taught. The first assignment given in high school allowing the use of AI should task students with running a selection of prompts to produce an incorrect statement or answer. Then students should be instructed to “trick” the AI into giving a wrong answer themselves.
I think there’s a big difference, depending on what exactly they’re trying to do or ban.
Using generative AI on pupils is bad. Like grading their assignments… Dehumanizing education… Replacing their textbooks with low-quality ones…
Teaching them how to use AI, and how not to use it, and generally: what’s out there in the world… that is a good thing.
Based on the quote seems to clearly be speaking about the latter.
Although hopefully the former is already banned or will be across the board
sam altman, alex karp, jensen huang, mark zuckerberg, elon musk… some of the big names of ai
Are these the people you want behind the education of children?
Their agenda is not a better society.
ai was of course inevitable, but as per usual humans are why we cannot have nice things.
Teaching children using something that is so detrimental to the environment, privacy, and standard of living is also disgustingly ironic.
You can name names all you want.
Henry Ford made the car a commercial product for the average American. He’s a terrible guy and was a racist and a Nazi.
Yet it still makes sense for schools to have drivers ed. Most students will drive so investing time into making sure they do it safely is what makes sense.
It’s here, and it will continue to be here. I’d rather it not be, but denial isn’t productive. If we teach students what it’s actually capable of and its limitations maybe we can get people to stop using it as a conversation partner and a search tool.
Also let’s be honest here, my argument for its usefulness handles your issues quite well. Today we have people asking LLMs what to think about topic x. When I argued its usefulness by instructing it to take data set x, provided by the user, and do Y and Z to it. No way to insert an agenda into that. Of course you proof it afterwards as I said
I have no issue with the usa having ai, as long as the usa builds a wall around itself, and its pollution.
Earth deserves better than trash.
unfortunately school administrations are kinda interested in it because it artificially boosts stats which means they can get a bigger piece of the pie the next quarter
i just recently heard its use pervasively in some dental offices since 2024, and they often give hallucinated areas on a tooth leading to unneccesary procedures and costs, this is probably why it wont be diagnosing cancer anytime soon(because it will likely hallucinate a tumor more than not.
Diagnosing is a separate process that involves several steps, so I’m setting that word aside but
Identifying cancer in imaging or pathology smears is one of the better things certain types (not generative, not LLM) of AI is actually good for. But again it’s specifically tweaked programs that aren’t just general usage.
Leasing to unnecessary procedures and costs is probably the reason why dental offices would be interested, lol.
Though to clarify, did dental offices started using LLMs?
The things is that LLM and to a lesser degree other generative AI (generating pictures, music, videos) are the things that generated current hype and they have the hallucination issue.
The traditional AI that we had for years like image recognition, or solving specific problems (for example driving a car), machine learning (back then we were more humble and that name was used to emphasize that it doesn’t actually think) etc those things are as they used to be and they don’t have this specific hallucination issue. The hallucination is really problem of the LLMs, but looks like now people call everything AI, which technically is not wrong (even things that we take for granted like GPS navigation or speech recognition are AI), but that help LLM obscure itself with other intentions.
I actually hope dentists use the old proven image recognition not asking chatgpt which is a chat bot that also incorporates other technologies to make it look better than it actually is.
Can’t read the article so idk if that’s the intention but Ai literacy needs to be taught at some point and a beurocratic ban wouldn’t let teachers include it in their curriculum
Man, we can’t even teach basic media literacy
I definitely agree with this, tech literacy should absolutely be taught. I view this as similar to how elementary aged children aren’t allowed to use calculators in math, because it’s actually pretty important that you learn to do the basics. But the reality is that AI is being used in all sorts of professional environments in very productive ways now, and it will be important to learn how to utilize it skillfully and ethically.
But the reality is that AI is being used in all sorts of professional environments in very productive ways now,
The reality is that that claim is anecdotal at best as there is no way to quantify the productivity of LLM use.
Productivity is value generated per unit of cost. You cannot reliably predict the token use of successfully completing any given task or even reproduce the same token use for running the same task again later. If you cannot quantify the cost you cannot quantify productivity.
Yes, my information is anecdotal, but that’s no reason to dismiss it out of hand. I personally know attorneys, physicians, and software engineers for whom AI has become an integral tool in their work. These are all super competent people who understand how to use it and never rely on it for a final draft. That it’s increased their productivity individually is frankly undeniable. It sounds like you’re talking about expecting AI to spit out a reliable final product, which is absolutely not what it should be used for
The article link works (it’s an archive.today link, not the WashPost site itself)
It doesn’t load for me, maybe I’m geoblocked
New York City Public Schools, the largest school system in the country, has banned student-facing generative artificial intelligence tools in classrooms through eighth grade for this school year, adopting one of the most aggressive AI policies in the nation.
The moratorium follows intense pressure from parents and other advocates, who urged New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) to enact a two-year ban on AI in classrooms.
It also comes amid a more widespread backlash to technology that has spurred screen-time limits in dozens of school systems, including Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest public school district. Last year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) banned cellphones from the state’s public schools, following similar actions in dozens of other states.
Mamdani’s plan calls for a one-year pause that he said can be extended or amended, depending on how the first year goes.
“This moratorium is a commitment to getting the future right,” Mamdani said during a news conference Wednesday morning. “Kids need to learn to think for themselves, they need to work alongside their peers, they need to learn how to ask better questions, and they need to learn what it feels like to not know the answer.”
The new policy also seeks to tighten screen-time limits for the youngest learners in the school district. The city is recommending 30-minute screen-time limits for students in third to fifth grade and 45 minutes for sixth to eighth grades.
Mamdani said the city will also disable AI components in more than 38 technology platforms that students have previously used. If AI capabilities cannot be removed from a program, the school district will stop using it.
Meanwhile, for older students, the city will pilot five “rigorously vetted” educational AI programs in some high schools, and introduce two 45-minute AI literacy modules designed to teach teens about AI-related bias, risks and ethical considerations.
Ty for that
“educational ai programs” doesn’t sound great to me, but i guess that’s why they’re pilot testing it
A lot of adults have yet to learn this…
The fact that this phrase is revolutionary and newsworthy makes this world so dystopian that it’s hard to believe.
I understand the intention, but I’d argue high school is where its at the most corrosive. High school is where kids are forming their independent learning habits - we’re already seeing the effects of AI becoming a crutch at this point in the game.
It makes even the smartest kids thick as pig shit because they start to depend on it, in the same way a lot our generation’s handwriting went down the shitter because of computers.
in the same way a lot our generation’s handwriting went down the shitter because of computers.
I’m not saying this because I’m a millennial but apparently we’re the “last normal” generation because we didn’t grow up as much with AI, social media and smartphones and tablet which does everything as we wish. Social media back then was for funsies, where your posts are for friends and family to cherish and not for the whole world to see. The smartphones only came later in our lives rather than thrust upon us when we were babies. Then of course, we didn’t use AI until now. Millenials and the older folks have had to do most things ourselves.
The smartphones only came later in our lives rather than thrust upon us when we were babies.
That thing ever changed everything, it’s a literal double-edged sword. No longer having separate devices for specific needs, but instead people started becoming dependent on it, to the point that nearly every other form of entertainment became neglected, and even certain human aspects such as the ability to write by hand (there goes the postal service) or reading an actual book (there goes the local bookstore or public library). Now nearly everyone is on social media, and in some countries Facebook has become its own Internet.
Yeah, I’ve heard that “last normal generation” stuff said a lot too.
It pains me to see my younger family members getting caught up in all of this, while most of the world’s Governments seem hellbent on looking the other way - or worse using it as an excuse to give themselves extra surveillance powers (cough age verification cough) while doing nothing much to solve the main issue
If we the “the last normal generation”
Doesn’t that then make us Abby Normal?
The number of new nurses / doctors who auto-piloted their way through school is fucking staggering.
There’re no checks, they just take ChatGPT’s vomit at face value.
Then they start working, and they’re just bad.
AI needs to be banned from education, period. Think with your own brain.
I think at this point society needs to unite, and push the genie back into its bottle by any means possible.
That’s going to require the working class seizing power. I think we’re working on that.
In a social capacity, that’s already happening. Look how many online communities ban AI slop and how many irl communities push back hard against new data centers.
Even the economic side of things is starting to question the AI narrative, but I think they’re playing along as we’ll have to acknowledge we’re in a huge recession when AI is exposed as vaporware.
Aren’t exams in person? I know board certification exams are written and in person in front of, believe it or not, a board. I just can’t imagine cheating your way through knowing that, at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to be just you.
Maybe I’m just old though.
The issue is the people who do just good enough on the exams to squeak by with the minimum. Exams also don’t do a great job of testing critical thinking, which is what AI use really destroys.
It’s like the old “book smart but no common sense” situation, but in this case even the book smart side is taking a hit because students will just study AI excrement without verifying that it’s accurate. And the common sense side isn’t just undeveloped, it’s actively attacked.
AI is making people stupid.
Yes they are. LLMs are also new enough that we’ve had perhaps one or two graduating classes that would have had access to it the entire time.
The health of the nation requires a citizenry capable of critical thinking to draw upon to manage and direct the fate of the nation. Now, obviously, the wealthy don’t want anyone but themselves to be capable of such a thing. So here we are.
They should ban that shit until you graduate college.the kids who are nerds will always figure out a way. The rest who are not into computers and such definitely should stay the fuck away. If you’re not careful you’ll become a zombie that works to pay for access to his brains as a rental subscription.
That’s just so messed up. It should not just be banned but down right illegal to sell an AI subscription if the data used was stolen from the public in the first place.
AI is ruining my workplace. Ban this shit full stop.
Yeah, if running AI took a fancy graphics card and some basic scripting knowledge, a lot of the short cutters would get filtered out right away. I’d rather write a four page paper than struggle to get a strange piece of software working on a deadline and I’m a tech-adjacent Linux enthusiast. The commercialization of AI is the problem: the fact that they’re preying on people’s desire to stand out, to be exceptional, to get positive social feedback, to succeed in the hierarchy, to make their over-packed lives easier, etc. Open-source Academic AI would have had a some of the same issues, like being coopted by governments, but in general I think things would be magnitudes less terrible.
I appreciate your last point about stolen data. I appreciated it from a marketing/intelligence/propaganda point-of-view, and you from the ownership/intellectual property point of view, but we ended up in really similar places.
Lol at the zombie thing too.
Maybe we should take an example from Warhammer 40k, and just ban all "abominable intelligences.
Better the Butlerian Jihad from Dune!
The Butlerian Jihad went so far as to ban computers too. I don’t think that’ll be necessary.
ban computers too. I don’t think that’ll be necessary.
The next tech bro abomination is gonna make you regret saying that.
Not before they used the computers to make really good drugs, though. That’s the difference between us and them
Fucking hell. High school is where they start to learn to think for themselves the most.
Even more so, university students are truly becoming independent adults. Really, it should be banned for everyone, but that’s not likely to happen.
Or at least teach them it’s limitations and to not rely on it.
Like anyone cares if it’s good enough for a passing grade.
You don’t go to school to get grades, jackass, you go to learn.
Do you think most kids care about that? If it can be used to pass, they’ll use it. “Teaching its limitations” is basically of a “smoking kills” value.
What a stupid as fuck take. Literally advocating for incompetence. Everyone’s doing it, just turn off your brain!
The fuck you mean? I am advocating for a ban rather than just teaching about its inaccuracy (as most kids won’t care if it just gets the job done).
You can go read on r/teachers (https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Teachers) just how bad this shit is getting--both phone use, and AI use for assignments.
We seriously need to completely ban both phones and AI use in grade school. Back to pencil and paper, and “show your work”. The kids coming out of high school now can barely read, beyond texting. It’s frightening.
If you give a fuck about your kids, you’ll make sure they can read and write, because the schools don’t give a fuck about your kids.
Teachers give a fuck. Unfortunately we refuse to adequately fund schools and don’t give teachers the latitude to teach.
They sneaking in those dummy phones too?
One thing to promote literacy might be calm down about the sex, drugs and violence in books. I didn’t have a single interesting assigned reading until Red Dragon in highschool.
A Time to Kill, great. Wish I read that instead of to kill a mockingbird.
Bad take, Mockingbird is great. Compelling and depressingly relevant to this day.
It’s a good book, yes, but I was not interested in it and I had the executive function of a teenage boy.
If we catered education to only the things that appeal to the most distracted teenage boys it would just be tits and explosions.
Actually I’d like to argue the reflective point: why is there not an expectation that coursework should be interesting and compelling for students?
why is there not an expectation that coursework should be interesting and compelling for students?
As you said, you had the executive function of a teenage boy. The works still get taught because they are interesting and relevant. but it’s hard to see that as a kid, as you’re developing vocabulary and literacy and also lacking life experiences to relate.
Schools try to compromise by giving a list of choices and letting students choose from those on what is most interesting. But curriculums only flex so much.
they are interesting and relevant. but it’s hard to see that as a kid
Yeah so there’s this projection of, this is good and valuable to you, regardless what your circumstances and abilities are.
If it gets them writing essays and participating who cares?
Because analyzing themes and connecting it to history and sociology are important media literacy skills that high schoolers should be learning.
A Time to Kill won’t fulfill that?
The parents, apparently.
Schools are warehouses to hold children while parents are at work.
Public schools are. For high school, I went to a free online charter school. I received a substantially better education than my friends in the magnet public high school.
I get there are other problems with the whole ‘school choice’ debate, but my family was broke and I was still able to get a better education. That’s a plus imo and I’d recommend it to anyone.
If we forced rich people to send their children to public schools, public schools would get a lot better. By allowing them to have a choice, they choose to defund the public school.
If we forced rich people to send their children to public schools, they would all move to public school districts in areas with housing too expensive for poor families to afford. That’s not a hypothetical, that’s just current reality.
The problem is rich people, not what options they do or do not have.
That’s solvable with bussing, unless rich people all want to live out in the middle of nowhere in compounds or something.
The problem is rich people, which is why we should take away their options. They currently have the option to make rich-only school districts and we could take that away from them too. Point is, we have to force them to use the same school as everyone else.
Agree.
It’s an illusion either way. Public schools are funded by property taxes. property taxes are based on the home’s worth. So you see how this snowballs.
Property taxes keep getting cut and capped by people who don’t use public schools, because they don’t see the personal benefit to it.
This would have an effect.
Although pooling property taxes across entire states makes more sense than the weird school district thing we have going on.
I went to one of the worst schools in my state. The education was fine, schools are judged by their student body, not the teachers.
Graduated undergrad with a 4.0 in my engineering field, then got a doctorate from one of the most prestigious programs in the world. Now I’m a depressed techie waiting to FIRE, but I wouldn’t blame my public high school for that.
“FIRE”?
Financial Independence Retire Early
Ah, “paradise.” Good luck with that, genuinely.
“No child left behind” turned into “more children left behind.”
They weren’t left behind; they were trampled by the machine pushing them forward.
And, in retrospect, the reality of “No Child Left Behind” fits the MO of US governance: they are catering to the optics of “a child being held back in grade” and not to the actual issues that are preventing the child from learning.
Totally freeking agree. My family are all teachers and wow. The protocol for cellphones is you put them away at your cubby.
But now they’re bringing their real phones AND a dummy one to put in the pouches instead.
nd yes. AI destroying critical thinking skills. This generation is fucked. iPad parents as well.
Shortening attention spans with those “shorts” on YouTube and other places.
…just put signal jammers in each class in easy to reach spot for a teacher, sheesh. AI requires net, FB and Insta too. Nowadays kids don’t do offline so that should solve the problem.
because the schools don’t give a fuck about your kids.
News flash: it’s not just the schools, unfortunately.
