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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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