The US is fucking cooked
I can’t help but think this is a phenomenon unique to the US where education has been completely devalued. If the only point of education is to fulfill a requirement to make more money then it makes sense to shortcut as much as possible.
The solution is of course no computer
Hexbear: AI is literally making people stupid! It’s a demonic abomination that must be abolished
Also hexbear: but not when it’s negatively impacting our shitty education system
contrasts
On one hand AI is absolutely disastrous as many cognitively offload onto LLMs reducing the onus to ever think. On the other hand it’s worth addressing the fact that the education system wasn’t working well to begin with and AI is just accelerating its downfall.
The current education system is built mostly as daycare and also to build kids into being obedient workers with maybe some minor reforms to actually teach some useful information.
Remove AI from the equation students are still mostly not engaging with the content and cheat or circumvent the system in other ways to avoid learning because the system isn’t built to make you want to learn.
Im saying this as someone who took payment to do other people’s work but also someone who flunked out in later years because of stress from never ending bullshit memorising exercises that never actually taught me why or how anything existed. Memorising equations for maths and physics sucked just like memorising quotes for 10 different potential English essays. 99% of my success was driven by my teachers predicting the exams questions and telling us to focus on that content
Nobody here thinks that AI is good. We just think that the impact of AI is heavily overstated in the field of education. People have too much recency bias and forget that all these problems were (almost) as bad as before AI as after it.
And perhaps people who haven’t been in education in a long time might have simply forgotten. But how is AI really that much worse than chegg or stackoverflow or sparknotes or any of the other tools/methods that already existed to minimise your engagement with the material? AI is the same category of such tools, it’s just the logical end point of them. The dialectic has reached its inflection point.
Yes. It absolutely is.
How so?
I meant to respond this morning and was going to write a whole lot but the day got away from me.
When people had to cheat using Cliff’s notes or whatever they still had to engage critical thinking. There were only a few places where the information was summarized and you couldn’t directly copy, so you at least had to read and interpret the summary in order to make a passable end product. With an LLM you literally don’t even need to know what the question was, you can blindfold yourself and copy/paste a prompt and then copy/paste the output.
When new “shortcuts” emerged in the past, good teachers tried to game-ify a way to teach something the students who were going to rely on them anyway. That’s so much harder to do with LLMs and the education system is finally starting to die after decades of strangulation, it’s in no position to meet this level of challenge. That means that kids and teachers will feel more like education is worthless because you’re a sucker for trying to learn or teach.
People use calculators as an example, they can do the math for you and it hasn’t led to the death of math or whatever. They can do the specific calculation for you, but the critical thinking aspect of knowing what the correct calculation should be still had to come from you. These models are changing that in a pretty terrible way.
Granted, AI is more convenient than previous tools, but it is only the final step towards the decay process rather than a qualitative leap on its own. If AI wasn’t invented, the state of education would still be backsliding. It would only be delayed a little.
To give an example, for virtually every course I have taken at university, there is a common pattern. The exam has been made easier year on year starting from about 2015-2018. This had to be done to prevent the pass rates from declining too much. And much of the decline happened before covid actually.
Not to mention that a huge portion of the current is due to covid and austerity, not necessarily AI.
It’s not that AI is more convenient, it’s that it is completely disengaging. I don’t think that AI is going to be the thing that breaks education, I think it’s going to break dramatically more than that. I’d never heard of Chegg before and that shit sounds really scummy, but at the end of the day all it could do is make you less likely to learn something about a particular assignment. People are straight up turning their brains off and leaving them that way now.
AI is bad (or at least the way it’s being implemented by capitalism is bad) but also the education system is struggling and needs to be improved somewhat.
Hexbear: AI is literally making people stupid! It’s a demonic abomination that must be abolished
Also hexbear: looks like the students using AI are reacting to their material conditions, perhaps we should improve them somewhat.
You must be reading the thread on chapo.chat because here on hexbear im seeing a lot of “education has always been worthless” and “any education that AI could ruin was worthless anyway.” When literally people constantly post about how relying on AI is literally rotting people’s brains and cognitive capabilities.
This is literally just people with grievances about their time in school lashing out no matter how contradictory it is with their own position on AI in general
Also i really love the “kids should direct their own education, if you make someone learn something they hate it’s just wasting their time” shit like yes let’s let the same age group that if allowed to choose their own dinner would pick chicken tenders 10/10 nights to direct their own fucking education lol. I D E A L I S M
People posting about the material conditions of their school time and how they can see why students would use AI doesn’t mean they agree with the usage of AI but that they empathize.
There’s another whoooole discussion to be had about how kids are introduced to food, how there are good foods and bad foods. Allowed and forbidden foods. Food used as punishment and as reward (you must eat everything on your plate before you get dessert). There is a reason why a lot of kids would pick chicken tenders 10/10 nights and it’s not them being stupid. That’s idealism. Looking at what material conditions leads to students cheating, not wanting to learn etc would be the materialist approach. Because kids are curious by nature but there is a systemic effort to force feed them what they’re supposed to learn killing that curiosity. Griping about that system is the opposite of idealism, it’s materialist.
I am incredibly cognizant about all of these things with my kids and expose them to a huge variety of foods, give them massive amounts of freedom to eat what they want, and generally cultivate a positive relationship with and understanding of eating. They will be dramatically less fucked up about food than 99.9% of people when they grow up. Hell, they’re already dramatically less fucked up about food than 99.9% of people, but right now they are still fucking stupid. It’s not idealism. On the other hand, the notion that if everything is exactly perfect then it will produce a still-unlikely outcome in every individual in a society is mainlining ideology.
Your words, not mine, never said “kids choose this because they’re stupid” chief
Your first paragraph is fine, because your argument is a non-argument and is mostly just stating what people believe (people can both condemn AI and the Amerikkkan Education System).
Your second one is just a lack of investigation and a false contradiction. It is not contradictory to believe both the system designed by capitalists to train factory workers and managers is awful and the glorified Markov statistics algorithms masquerading as intelligence are bad. Also, the grievances you talk about are entirely valid, as they are based upon the nightmare education system that many Euro-American countries have. And sure, maybe your situation was different, but that’s a good thing for you because you didn’t have to deal with a shit school. It’s just not acceptable though to turn around and say that just because you don’t know how bad it is, that it isn’t bad. I won’t deny your trauma, and you shouldn’t deny others. Simple as that.
Your third one is just bad. Your argument is “Kids sometimes make bad choices, so they shouldn’t be able to make other choices” - am I getting that right? To that, I say that literally everyone makes bad choices, and just because someone expresses bad judgement doesn’t mean that it is right to revoke them rights or their ability to consent or revoke their consent to situations. Kids often know a lot more about themselves than people think. Not to an absurd degree, but contradictory to the “Children as unthinking property” thesis that the bourgeoisie establishment constantly touts.
Removed by mod
Not all kids are that stupid and treating them like they are stunts their growth.
Oh no kids have to make their own choices (under controlled environments) and must deal with the consequences (under controlled environments). Think about the horrible consequences, that kids will learn how to be responsible!
The above paragraph is somewhat disingenuous to what your argument probably is, but that’s what your argument comes across as.
This is insane, i’m convinced these answers belong to people who are still in highschool or haven’t given more than 5 minutes of their time to actually thinking about the educational system.
Ableism + children bad?
Lost facebook user?
DAE having a school curriculum is authoritarian because i can’t study le minecraft???
Who is even advocating for this? And where did “authortarianism” or minecraft come from?
Are people currently in contact with education (as students or teachers) not allowed to discuss the influence of material conditions on human beings?
Or does “materialism” mean “clench your teeth, imagine a military parade and litsen to the soviet national anthem”?