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Comment by tuukkah | Hacker News Reader

For a reasonable interpretation, I offer this (in the context of programming): "The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. [--] Working with (and even paying) a tutor to help you with the course, provided the tutor does not do your work for you." https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2023/honesty/

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This is where AI could act as a good equalizer.

Having access to people who can sit down with you and explain things to you when you get stuck, or who can point out mistakes in your existing understanding or your work, can make a huge difference in the outcomes of students.

If AI gets good enough to fill that role, everyone can have that access (or at least something close enough).

Pretty sure that would require AGI, and is at least well beyond the means of LLMs.

You can ask ChatGPT why your code is not working right, and often it will give a helpful suggestion. Sure, the suggestion may be wrong or misleading, but it can help you get unstuck in any case.

That's a huge distance away from it being a tutor. A tutor would have a plan for how to educate you, and would consistently choose examples and problems to present in order to demonstrate the knowledge they are seeking to impart. It's not about giving you little hints, it's essentially the very opposite.

In my mind, what you are describing is the responsibility of the teacher. I was thinking more along the lines of how parents help their children in their homework. Like the grandparent wrote:

> who can sit down with you and explain things to you when you get stuck, or who can point out mistakes in your existing understanding or your work

That being said, I don't see why what you describe would require AGI. It won't be an excellent teacher or tutor in those tasks, but it may be good enough and make up in the price, availability and repetition.

It can already do super useful stuff, basically google search, gather results, summarize, (hallucinate, ) which makes it faster and sometimes easier to do this kind of research. Let's be honest, not everyone is so good at reading comprehension, it's an important thing taught and tested in school after all. ChatGPT can basically help those lacking in reading comprehension and research skills and create summaries for them.

Why would you expect the AI to not be a paid service like a human tutor is? ChatGPT has a $0 tier, but it's also in a publicity phase, and they already have a "pro" subscription tier. Microsoft/GitHub likewise are charging for extended access to Copilot, and so is Stability with their Dream Studio application.

It'll be cheaper for the school, the parents or the social services to provide you access to an AI tutor than to more human instruction. Already, learning games can prevent or cure (some) learning disabilities via engagement and repetition in a cost-effective way.

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