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Comment by marviel | Hacker News Reader

AI-assisted education is promising.

I'm still struggling to see how you would need thousands of AI generated images rather than just using existing real images for education.

The company I work for generates thousands of these each week for children's personalized storybooks to help them learn how to read. The story text is the core part of the application, but the personalized images are what make them engaging.

- personalization (style, analogy to known concepts)

- specificity (a diagram that perfectly encapsulates the exact set of concepts you're asking about)

But LLMs are not reliable enough, so you can not actually expect “specificity”

Not perfect now, but adequate in some domains. Will only get better.

> Will only get better.

AI companies are still in their "burning money" phase.

Enshittification is not on the horizon yet, but it's inevitable.

While I have no doubt that individual companies, such as OpenAI for example, will eventually introduce enshittification features, I doubt the industry as a whole can be summarized that easily.

I believe, over all, development will go forward and things will get better. A rising tide lifts all ships, even if some of them decide to be shitty leaking vessels. If nothing else we always have open source software to fall back on when the enshittification of the proprietary models start.

For a practical example: The cars we drive today are a lot better than 100 years ago. A bad future isn't always inevitable.

But are cars we drive today better than they were 10 years ago? 20 years ago? Reliability is now trending down for cars, safety is questionable as deaths and injuries have been steadily increasing for a number of years now. Features are getting converted to subscriptions, and they all constantly send back telemetry.

Good points!

More reliable than 80% of my teachers growing up.

That is true in a broader sense, but education and abundant money don't generally go hand in hand.

don't I know it

"Having trouble with your algebra? MathWiz is having a 20% discount this month only. Only $24.95 / month. This is an excellent deal. Don't you want to improve? Do you want to let your family down, like they thought you would? Or would like me to create an account for you?"

"Want to get a job? [COLLEGE] is having a 0% discount -- only $200,000 a year! Don't you want to have a place to live? Go horribly in debt, pick a degree that may not matter, all at an age where your Brain has not yet developed fully!"

etc

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