Hacker News Reader

Comment by NewsaHackO | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

"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'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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com