Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

The other day I read this piece on how AI is already being used in schools, and it left quite an impression on me. https://archive.is/IW4B3

> The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.

I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).

Yeah, I cannot imagine how anyone could learn anything well with access to AI. I am grateful that I finished my schooling before AI hit mainstream, because it is just too easy to turn your brain off and just AI a question before thinking about it. Great for getting things done, useless for learning. I guess hallucinations still keep us on our toes.

"Useless for learning" is just wrong. I've found LLMs immensely useful for directing my learning projects. Of course, a lot of the actual learning must come from doing things and puzzling through them myself. But I now find LLMs to be indispensable in finding out what I need to learn to accomplish a task, finding keywords to search on Wikipedia or in textbooks, and answering questions when I'm confused about something.

Part of the difference in your case is the motivation for learning. Many of us in grade school had a motivation to get good grades/pass a class outside of the pursuit of knowledge. Even for those of us that really liked to learn, it was usually directed at a certain subject matter and not everything that we would need to be successful as adults (I loved math, but would never willingly write an essay if I could get away with it). Because grade school kids are "forced" to learn things they do not want to, they always look for the easiest way to get through the material, and AI provides a way to do this.

I agree with your general point, but if people are going to use AI regardless, the question is whether we should teach young people how to use it effectively. If they don't learn this, they're more likely to use it a way that hampers their development.

Now, I don't know at what level that should begin. Probably somewhere around the high school level, when they're learning to do research projects and synthesize information from multiple sources, is when teaching AI literacy will be most important.

What value to a person does teaching "how to use it effectively" deliver?

How does that benefit their development, learning, society as a whole?

Before you start in with "it'll help them get a job", full stop - education as a public good isn't strictly vocational technician work. It's not a work training for companies.

For the same reason that we should teach people how to use a library, or a search engine, or an academic database. The tools for information retrieval are constantly evolving, and in a democratic society it's important that people learn how to educate themselves on a continuous basis throughout their lives. If you use AI properly, you can learn things that you wouldn't have had the time or skillset to learn otherwise.

It's worth remembering that this isn't that. What the poster describes is constant pushing from the Chrome OS designed to train dependence on the tools and to essentially checkout of the education process. In my opinion this is definitely useless for learning.

I would not say that. My child asks the AI factual questions the same way she would ask an adult. That's one kind of learning. There are others, of course.

When I say AI, I obviously don't mean using AI like people used to use search engines. Of course asking it factual questions like it is an encyclopedia is okay.

I'm an adult with a fairly balanced view of AI and I find it difficult to learn coding without occasionally using AI to help me navigate to the most relevant bits of MDN or help me check if my thinking on an approach is correct (it's all entry level stuff so should be well represented in the training data).

I find it easy to to into a long chat with an LLM about some project I'd like to try and what's involved with it. I find it easy to get into a chat with an LLM about a lot of things as a kind of unproductive excursion that my brain tells me at the time is 'useful'. I'm of average will, so I dread to think how this will work out with children who get to 'partner up with AI to assist them' or whatever marketing speak is used to obfuscate their goals. Then combine that with social developmental issues or below average focus.

It's bleak because the more entangled they get with the system the more they'll seek to push back regulations.

> Yeah, I cannot imagine how anyone could learn anything well with access to AI.

You must not have much of an imagination then. Or maybe you're just being overdramatic? AI is arguably the best way to learn most subjects now. Frontier models have made a lot of progress on reducing hallucinations, and AI can teach you at whatever pace you're capable of learning it. There are very few topics it can't teach, and it can go into more depth than you'll find in any textbook.

"and it can go into more depth than you'll find in any textbook"

How does it manage that, when it it only knows as much as is written in text books?

It can peruse research papers, world news, encyclopedias, product manuals, and dissertations.

Using AI in an intentional way with purpose and direction should be great for practicing thinking.

The right way to teach children to use AI is to teach them to scope, filter, design process, edit, refine. How to ask a question, how to think through steps, how to use language to describe all these things. Each kid has something that can think and respond as fast as they input.

The goal should be to perfect sequence and iteration, not skip to final output.

These skills also should NOT be framed in some kind of "teaching AI" as much as teaching communication and critical thinking and analysis. It is the exact same skills you need to solve problems and interact with humans.

> I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece,

It's not about being anti-AI, it's about being anti-distractions in education.

These companies don't want to raise "AI literacy", they want to get to their future users young.

It’s such a lazy way of integrating AI as well, as if they asked AI to do it.

Why has no one tackled the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer? We know what AI-enhanced education should be, and we finally have the tech to build it.

"You're absolutely right, Nell. I shouldn't have confused ethylene glycol with propylene glycol. Would you like to know more about funeral services?"

The missing bit is a representation of knowledge, and a way to represent a learner’s comprehension.

Even if you shortcut by synthesizing a textbook in every major topic - that’s just one arbitrary representation, and the way topics overlap is outside of the material.

I am very interested in this though, if anyone has references to relevant research I’m all ears.

> If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.”

To be fair, making slideshows sucks and I've never met anyone that actually enjoys the experience. I'm sure some people out there enjoy it, but anything that gets me out of PowerPoint faster is a win in my book.

David Byrne seems to like it: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03...

I haven't seen his actual slide deck anywhere online though.

Back when I created them (high school), I enjoyed it, because it was about making an appealing presentation about the data we researched.

If you care about the information and communication, and you think you can do a good job of the slide deck if you think through it for this venue and audience -- and maybe even have new insights by going through the process -- then it can be enjoyable/rewarding.

But I've also seen situations in which the presenter doesn't care, or the slides are just a backdrop for some better communication/selling/maneuvering they're doing, or they know the information is bogus or the presentation pointless, or they know the audience doesn't care, or for everyone it's just a meeting to be able to say you had a meeting.

I'd guess that at least half the current use of LLMs is for "cheating on your homework" tasks, in which the person prompting it simply doesn't care -- whether it's for schoolwork, professional work, or socializing.

There are two parts of making a slide show: 1. Visualizing what you want to show 2. Finding tools to show it

Developing 1 means you need to start with pen and paper without any pollution from existing tools. You might read and experiment beforehand and use as many tools as possible (including AI) but at least once before you make thr final version you should sit down and just think from scratch what you want to show.

Then you can use AI for 2. Teaching kids 1 is very difficult while simultaneously giving them access to AI since they are too young to develop that self control.

There was one I did have fun making:

Back around 2007 it was about AI, and for part of it I'd memorized like 2-3 minutes of what I was going to say, along with careful timing. The plan was that I'd start wandering around, including around the back of my laptop so I wasn't looking at the projector or laptop screen - and during that time, robot characters would wander onto the screen and start running around. The idea was I wouldn't look back until right after they hid themselves. I think I'd even put a spot in the middle where I could glance back while they were hidden, then they'd come back out.

I don't remember why, but I never got to present it.

It's the same thing as shoeing away Clippy, right? I don't know, I'm a little out of the loop. I do feel like there's some societal backlash to technology that's cascading down to the younger generations now that the negativity of social media is bearing fruit. Right?

We had chromebooks in schools before AI - or iPads, depending on the area. We're about to repeat that disaster.

It's never been about making education better. It's about building and legally mandating a money hose directly from your town property tax levy to accounts receivable at Google and Microsoft and OpenAI.

dystopian :( i hope schools put more pressure on keeping that off their devices. or switch to neos.

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