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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

At this point I would support a ban on generative AI by anyone under 18, or even perhaps 21 years of age.

A bunch of science fiction stories had "first connection to cyberspace" as a coming of age event, maybe those authors were on to something.

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It’s like the greatest teacher. Plus it’s not toxic like social media. Banning it would be a shame.

Its not teaching. These people cant pass a the class. They never went through the friction needed to learn

It depends how you use it. You can either get it to explain a concept, or do your homework for you. Its a bit like the decision students have to make as to whether to review their material before exams or go out partying.

Overall it just seems like a huge waste of money to piss away the huge tuition cost your parents probably paid.

You can use an llm to get out of doing homework but you can also use it to ask every question you would ever wanted in a 1-1 tutoring session. The problem is kids will use it to cheat on their homework. If we can’t deal with that problem then a ban is necessary. But these things can be phenomenal teachers if you use them properly.

As an educator, this is exactly what I struggle with. I'm pulling out all the stops to give students every chance to do the hard work and not lean on AI. But there's a good chunk of the class who don't listen to reason. I haven't figured it out yet. They know, logically, they can't pass an interview, but that's apparently a "tomorrow" problem.

The smart ones either use it not at all, or use it to positive effect, like you're saying.

> But there's a good chunk of the class who don't listen to reason. I haven't figured it out yet. They know, logically, they can't pass an interview, but that's apparently a "tomorrow" problem.

These people should be doing manual work, not intellectual work. There is no shortage of manual work available.

This.

It's funny that GP mentioned science fiction as a negative because what immediately springs to mind, for me, is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. We literally have the tools to build his "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" today. We just have to give today's AI a lesson plan to follow and ensure that it never gives the student the answers, and only keeps explaining the concepts in different ways until they click. Wrap that in an iPad app and you've essentially got the exact self-paced learning tool that Stephenson envisioned changing the world.

And how do you propose that to work if the internet is still full of AI services that just give you the answer or write your essay? The only way an Illustrated Primer can work if you can’t trivially cheat. Which is to say, it solves nothing compared to the current situation.

Why are you assuming that all students will cheat? That's entirely unreasonable.

But if you want a way to push cheaters towards doing the work then a boarding school without cell service would work. Although I guess these days you'd also have to account for starlink and the like.

Probably easier to warn everyone that they will almost certainly fail if they cheat and then be entirely uncompromising when it comes time for exams. Not your problem if they knowingly shoot themselves in the foot.

Public education is about forcing kids (the vast majority of whom are literally incapable of long term planning) to become educated so as to have a stabilizing effect on society.

An uneducated populace is easily lead astray, am existential threat to a democratic society.

They are great for self-teaching and great to cheat and not learn anything, depending on how you use them.

Main problem is that the technology was very disruptive for education and nobody has figured out yet how to utilize it at scale for schools and universities.

Social media wasn't always toxic at least not to the degree it is today. LLMs could be potentially a lot worse given the right set of instructions

For every 1 child that uses AI to learn, there are 10 that will use it to bypass learning. It isn't worth it.

I can't agree. That's similar to past arguments for banning books and the internet.

Plagiarism isn't new, and those things enabled it too.

We don't let kindergartners use calculators before they learn how to add numbers.

We shouldn't let LLMs write papers before kids learn how to write for themselves.

Why not though? I'm pretty sure many (especially this crowd) have childhood memories of playing with calculators before really knowing how to add.

A ton of natural questions arose like how it differs from tallying or concatenation, what the decimal point means, what negative means, ways to get to zero, ways to overflow the display, what even is overflow, what the other buttons do, etc.

The limitations are very obvious very quickly and their frustrations only further motivate the student to learn it properly.

I think beyond all else, what you're really proving is that this is more political ideology than a genuine concern.

ban has always been the failing option

Tell that to millions of ex-smokers.

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