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Comment by rng_civ | Hacker News Reader

Prediction: the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will be the one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate the student towards learning and self improvement.

If such an AI teacher style becomes widespread, this means that they have the potential to replace the parental relationship (in the same manner AI girlfriend/boyfriends threaten romantic relationships).

I see people talk about the dangers of the AI girlfriend/boyfriend, but not the dangers of introducing AI teachers to (especially young) kids. Nominal adults are already being affected by this (see Replika and company) and they are not even the "best".

If I wear my cynical hat for a second, I'm willing to bet that this parental replacement is a certainty, as an extension of the "screen" parenting that already exists. But this time, it might actually be helpful for the child so it will be socially acceptable and encouraged.

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> the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will be the one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate the student towards learning and self improvement

Spot on. It would be interesting to see how one would train a model to do this

I agree with that point, too.

My guess is that current models are not yet able to provide consistent, effective motivation to learners over the long term. Like a lot of new educational technology, they might be fun and engaging in the short term but will lose their effectiveness as motivators once the shine has worn off.

But the models might become better motivators as they become more multimodal, so that they are able to respond in real time to the student’s tone of voice and facial expressions, and as they acquire longer context windows, so that they are able to adapt their interactions to what the student has done weeks or months earlier.

The biggest issue, I think, is what the OP raises: Whether the bots will be able to—or allowed to—acquire sufficiently human-like personalities and indentities so that they can motivate learners as human parents, teachers, and mentors do—by making the learners want to please them, to be praised by them, to avoid angering them, to emulate them.

We already have highly efficient "stand-alone" motivators, they're called video games. And for Educational video games, there's been attempts, some would say it's too difficult to integrate the two fields together, but looking at what's been attempted vs what's actually done in industry I can't say they've really tried that hard.

The problem I would imagine is that the kind of people who go on to make an educational video game probably will lack the necessary creative or aesthetic chops to do it. And no game dev is going to be dreaming of building one either. But if one were to commission a veteran studio instead we might get better results.

An app that makes my kid feel good about doing math? Sign me up!

Feeling good about math might not be the most optimal way of learning. What if the algorithm learns that emotional blackmail is the best way of getting someone to learn?

Since my neighbouring comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40983181) brings up a good point which I also would have brought up, I want to give another point:

At school, there existed some classmates who hated math as a school subject, but nevertheless loved my ramblings about mathematical topics (well, they were at least more interesting than some other school subjects). Nevertheless, I guess my style of motivating people to like and do math would not be loved by parents: it it rather of the style "I'll explain you stuff about plant and process engineering so that you can build a weed farm that will be harder to detect by the police" for math, i.e. explain what subversive stuff you can do if you know math. I don't want to go into the details here.

This is deeply motivating for particular kinds of kids (with punk traits) to become quite interested in mathematical topics, but of course many parents would hate it because my teaching methods for math turn the child into a bad citizen. ;-)

I agree with your general point -- we should lean into kids' existing motivations rather than wring our hands that kids don't like to do rote practice. Doing anything else is a failing strategy, unless we devise new motivational environments.

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