Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students
science.org
science.org
In this case, education, the answer is in the middle. It’s exploring and utilizing new tools while ensuring the base foundation of education. It’s really simple.
Apply “moderation” to nearly any facet of your life and it’s probably the correct choice. Want to consume alcohol? Moderate consumption. Enjoy TikTok or other video entertainment? Moderation. Work? Don’t destroy yourself, moderate extreme effort.
This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.
So I don’t think that we should meet a middle ground necessarily but wary of people that are trying to maxxx something.
Some people are not redeemable. Abolishing the death penalty is a mistake.
Another even less controversial example is providing adults and elderly euthanasia under certain circumstances.
I agree entirely.
>Abolishing the death penalty is a mistake.
Unless we can devise a method of perfectly determining guilt, there will always be some false convictions. Personally, I’m not comfortable with executing innocent people. If that means keeping irredeemable killers alive in prison, I’m ok with that.
The difference between AI robbing you of learning opportunities and acting as a tutor or sounding board is what question you ask.
AI really isn't a skill that needs to be taught, like adults didn't need to take a semester in AI-usage, so why should children need such a thing? Besides, it interferes with how we teach, which is done by having students write things in their own words (which is just "that which I can't explain, I don't understand", instrumentalized). It's not the essay that is the point, it's probably kinda shit, but the point is the fact that you are writing it. If AI does that work for them, then they simply don't learn. It's largely the same reason we don't let children use calculators when they're learning basic arithmetic. Calculators exist, and are useful, but they're awful in a teaching environment.
If we can use AI as an expert teacher with infinite time for each child, that does theoretically have promise (per bloom 2sigma). But it's also quite far away with what we've got right now.
The article's talking about the use of AI learning rather than learning how to use AI.
> If AI does that work for them, then they simply don't learn.
I agree, and I think the original commenter would agree too given that this doesn't sounds like moderation.
The no-ai end is "you write the whole essay yourself" the all-in end is "you give the ai and idea and have it write the essay". The moderation approach is somewhere in-between and it could very well be "you write the essay and ask the AI to proofread and coach you through it".
> It's largely the same reason we don't let children use calculators when they're learning basic arithmetic. Calculators exist, and are useful, but they're awful in a teaching environment.
Yes, having the ai act as a calculator when you need to learn and prove you can do it is a bad use of it. Having the Ai double check your work to catch errors, point out when you make the same mistake over and over, or ask it to walk you through another example are all productive uses.
Any time you reach for AI to make it easier, you're missing out on understanding and retention. If you cannot express the thing in your own words, then you do not understand it.
Just as you don't learn anything by copying someone else's homework, or expanding on someone else's summary (like if that worked, that's how we'd be doing already, holy crap would it accelerate teaching), the same doesn't work when AI is involved.
Again, it's not the essay that is the point, it's the work that goes into writing it. You need to hand it in so that the teacher understand where to put in more effort, but if it wasn't for that need, they'd probably have you throw it away after writing it. Because of this, AI even for finishing touches makes it harder for the teacher to assess your level, and the polish it brings doesn't actually help you learn.
I am not sure how your literature classes went, but all of my essays were graded and feedback was provided to me specifically so I can get better. Perhaps my previously reply was too long winded, but feedback on your essay on how to improve it is the exact use case I gave as an example.
Not that it's impossible to learn a subject that way, it just requires extremely self-motivated students.
At this point that's like saying Microsoft Excel isn't a skill that needs to be taught.
None of this stuff is easy to use, or obvious. If you want to get meaningful results out of it and avoid the many, many traps then there is an absolute ton you need to learn.
In the context of this conversation, the skill that needs to be learned is how to use AI to learn effectively. That gets into pedagogy and personal learning styles and self-discipline and all sorts of other extremely gnarly areas.
There seems to be a literal trap where people are too trusting of the LLM and take its word on code or whatever is being offered instead of reading it themselves.
In the context of the classroom this means teaching discernment more than ever.
Given how much time I spend teaching people how to use AI effectively, I humbly disagree.
AI slop is not using AI effectively.
> like adults didn't need to take a semester in AI-usage
… especially adults
> so why should children need such a thing?
So that the scope of merits and demerits of the tool are explicit from the start, and this understanding can evolve along with the tool.
Moderation in fentanyl.
But yeah, what's moderation and what's excessive is subjective.
So I agree with the comment. It was appropriately placed and a valid point. Moderation is key for many things, but there are exceptions. Things that are highly addictive and corrosive may be a good category for exceptions. Things that are clearly bad (e.g. murder) are exceptions.
When someone says "life is as simple as x" and the someon else says "hold on its not that simple, what about this exception" that latter rebuttal is valid and constructive.
This is an absurd statement. If someone is trying to talk about the middle cases, redirecting the conversation to the edge in order to dismiss their general comment is not appropriate.
'Edge cases exist' is not a lesson most people here need to hear.
This leaves it generously a thought teminating cliche devoid of meaning, certainly nothing you should be making decisions off.
It fails in every direction, not just stepping on legos and murder. It's in no way better to be moderately happy or healthy than extremely happy or healthy.
1) days contain more photons than nights
2) water boils at 100 degrees Celsius
3) eating excessive sugar will lead to obesity
They seem like good generalizations because they are true most of the time from the perspective of the speaker and listener, even thought there may be some exceptions, they are materially more rare:
1) except in multi-solar systems, where this can get complicated
2) except when under pressures different than approximately sea level atmosphere
3) except when ___ I'm not sure but I bet there is some medical exception, maybe excessive exercise?
Bad generalizations will have many many exceptions such that the generalizations is materially lossy and even dangerous (e.g. "everything in moderation" -> murder in moderation, meth in moderation, punching grandmas in the face in moderation, etc.)
I know these are your extreme examples but this is literally how society functions in each one.
Meth in moderation = prescription stimulants for ADHD or narcolepsy.
Murder in moderation = war, capital punishment.
Punching grandmas in the face in moderation = arrests of shoplifters or intoxicated grandmas apparently require physical restraint, lots of possible examples of violence for purported good on youtube.
Each of your hard lines are things that literally happen daily around the world, in moderation.
My gut still says it's easily misinterpreted and can be used as justification to do something that shouldn't be. It has something to do with scope of applicability, but to be fair that's true of my other "good" examples as well (e.g. water boiling at different temperatures / pressures).
My instinctive "hold on a minute" was the assumption "everything in moderation" was not a good generalization when applied to everyone as individuals rather than more broadly/universally.
I suspect others that took issue had a similar misalignment in scope. (Fentanyl in moderation for a drug addict is not sustainable, fentanyl in moderation for a non-addict recovering from surgery, probably good)
I feel like I've stumbled into some philosophy tar pit - questioning the meaning of generalization, moderation, scope, good judgement and "everything"... so I'll just concede for now, despite feeling uneasy about it.
Perhaps try looking up the thing you are talking about before making a moral judgement based on mass media soundbites.
Just moderate your moderation! It’s turtles all the way down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argumen...
What I've found as I get older is that when someone says "It’s really simple," that's a good sign it isn't.
Many students attend because it's a "piece of paper" that's mandatory for their career aspirations. They'll never get hired without the college cred, and so they need to grab it by any means necessary. It's often not their own money they're spending: it's a federal grant, a loan, or mommy and daddy pining to give the same or better opportunity to the next generation. So family pressure to achieve is often immense, and overwhelming to a child being shoved through this system.
Other students, they already have a job and/or family, striving to get ahead and be upwardly mobile according to the American Dream, and so they simply don't have time for actual study or homework, but they paid tuition and purchased books, and these consumers need their product that they already invested in.
Perverse incentives abound in higher education, and without removing those or reforming the system, you'll never, ever stop or slow down the cheating, which is pervasive and rampant, believe you me.
Oral discussions. That's probably the way education should work, but it requires the professor to spend time talking to each student individually, so it might not scale to large classes with hundreds of students.
I have no idea how accurate, or useful that analogy is, but personal intuition tells me it's really close. I also don't envy teachers. I used to teach, so I do understand the position they feel that they are required to adapt into. However, I prefer CS programs that don't encourage people to tolerate non-determinism, or otherwise unpredictable outputs. They're the source of some of the most intractable bugs, one i doubt the next generation of students will be able to troubleshoot correctly if they never learn to solve beginner level bugs without LLM assistance.
Was there any possibility of this not being the case? Rules which are not enforceable do not exist. If it's any part of the process you can't check, students are going to do it in the easiest way possible.
Unfortunately that’s not how it works…
Long ago, WordPerfect’s grammar checker showed me my writing flaws and helped me improve.
Pasting a poorly written report and getting a dramatically restructured report wouldn’t be as instructive, even if the final result looked “better”.
Assignments and tests were always lossy, and over time more cheating crept in.
Instruction should shift to benchmarking productive output, strategic thinking and group collaboration. Similar to labs where you are tested on completing an experiment or a project with artifacts. Or an MBA program with quarterly group objectives. A major part of the group effort is dealing with collaboration and overcoming obstacles like laggards.
Hopefully people will realize how poor testing is for preparing students for the real world. the ultimate goal is preparing the students for a productive life, most commonly in commercial enterprise, but even academic pursuits require collaboration, productivity and other characteristics that were not well assessed by traditional testing and homework.
Group projects with tangible artifacts, including finished prototypes that meet objectives. More emphasis on group projects. If AI accelerates productive development like with software, move the objectives up the ladder in complexity, or expectations.
Peer assessments and performance reviews like employment . This also helps prepare students for adult life.
If the subject matter is merchandisable, have the students operate an enterprise. My local high school has the students operate a food cart for example, and it opens to the public one weekend a month, otherwise open to students. Students are responsible for inventory, marketing, accounting, maintenance , customer service etc.
More verbal challenges . These can be operated by AI with human supervision while being recorded, with spot checks from supervisors.
Every diagnostic has a precision / recall curve and some fall through the cracks. But you have to shift your approach when old testing no longer becomes viable. Better that than to revert to the stone age of informatics.
The problem is that the purpose of group projects is (besides practicing programming) to facilitate learning together, splitting tasks, discussing approaches, presenting the outcome. Doing these requires understanding what's going on, and if you just vibe code everything you don't have enough knowledge to experience the soft-skill parts of the work.
The reasons become more obvious only when you get deeper into a field where the math gets too complex to get a simple answer out of a calculator. If you never learned the basic concepts, you can’t progress to the more difficult topics because you don’t have a good understanding of the foundation.
That’s why changing goals to only look at the output doesn’t work for educating kids. Now that they can have ChatGPT answer every question they might see on a middle school or even high school exam, you could conceivably get all the way through high school graduation never having learned a single thing other than how to copy and paste between the assignment and ChatGPT.
Then what happens in the real world when that student needs to learn something new? It’s obvious: They’re going to try to put the problem into ChatGPT and then give you the result back. They don’t have any foundational tools to do anything else. They haven’t even learned how to learn because there was always an easy way out. Why would anyone hire a person who can only act as an interface to ChatGPT? They won’t. They’ll use ChatGPT themselves.
My unpopular opinion is that some times hard work, memorization, doing work manually, and yes, even testing, are necessary to build up an education and thinking foundation. I don’t believe it can all be replaced by ideas about challenging students to get results and then ignoring how they arrive at the result. I’ve worked with kids enough to know that they are more resourceful about finding lazy ways to pass a test than you could ever imagine.
Students still have to muster their own answers, but the LLM is used to minimize the confusion or uncertainty about the quality of the answer and the time to wait for that clarity.
My understanding is decades of research long before AI has shown the benefit of timely constructive feedback on the learning process. Why aren't all educators tripping over themselves to use LLMs to maximize access to timely constructive feedback?
The real crux is not grounded in chat bots default behavior but the technology's capability: "Can LLMs provide access to timely constructive feedback in specific educational contexts?". The answer to this question is definitely yes. If you think the answer is no, then my guess is you haven't made an honest effort to try, or you just want the answer to be no and aren't interested in the truth.
"Can they" is not the same as "do they" and "specific educational contexts" is not relevant to "all educators"
Is it possible to get constructive feedback? sure, maybe. Is it possible to get a specific teacher's feedback? Not really. Is it possible to guarantee it will be productive feedback? No, especially if the student has to/gets to interact with it.
Is it likely that the reason "all educators" aren't tripping over themselves to have their students submit some number of drafts to an llm is because that's not actually a good idea? sure, probably.
Not maybe, definitely.
> it possible to get a specific teacher's feedback? Not really.
Yes actually it definitely is.
> Is it possible to guarantee it will be productive feedback? No, especially if the student has to/gets to interact with it.
Yes it is possible to guarantee it will be productive, and far more consistently productive than what teachers can achieve.
There are going to be educational contexts where LLMs can't provide productive feedback (because LLMs aren't relevant to the learning objectives). There are also many contexts where they are exceptional at producing productive feedback. Especially in grade school and qualitative undergrad courses.
I am pretty sure what's happening here is you are conflating LLMs with ChatGPT and other chat interfaces. That's a bit like conflating an internal combustion engine with a tractor, and then basing your experience with tractors on an opinion that busses can't exist. Indicated by this thing you said: "No, especially if the student has to/gets to interact with it.". It seems like you haven't considered that LLMs can have any kind of guard rails or custom instructions applied to them, can be packaged or constrained in how the user interacts with them.
An interface can allow a student to submit a draft, get static personalized pedagogically-optimized feedback tailored to the teachers criteria, learning objectives and reference material, without any way for the student to get any other output.
I find it both funny and a little irritating how confident you are that this isn't possible, because I've seen it with my own eyes used in both graduate and undergrad contexts to great success.
In a way you have answered my original query, which I am grateful for: "Why aren't all educators tripping over themselves to use LLMs to maximize access to timely constructive feedback?"
You're indicating the answer is because most educators are confidently incorrect about LLM capabilities. Plausible I guess.
So there are, or at least there will be, cases where it's actually a good idea to delegate your thinking to an AI model. Students who aren't taught to acknowledge that possibility and keep it in mind are being done a disservice, just as if they were taught to treat today's limited, early-generation LLMs as a first resort.
No one thinks you shouldn’t do 8 digit multiplication with a calculator, But you should understand what it’s doing under thr hood so if you say typo something you can catch when the answer is off by an order of magnitude.
But the same argument applies to AI. If you don’t understand the basics of an argument or the nature of the subject you’re investigating, you can’t tell - not even an if it’s working correctly but if it’s responding to the question you asked. If it applied the right context for your particular situation.
And I think it’s the exact same thing - whether AI is really thinking is irrelevant, students need to understand the nature of how to make arguments and validate information, before they can trust their own usage of AI.
You could think of this story[1] as an example of why it's not useful to compare AI models with pocket calculators. Here, some professional mathematicians successfully farmed out part of their thought process to an AI model.
It doesn't mean they shut their own brains down, or that they are suggesting that students do so, only that they allowed for the possibility that the model might be able to see something they didn't see themselves, or make a connection that no one had considered before.
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...
It doesn't not mean that either.
"Learned" didn't really mean what we mean today by being well educated or smart. You can't use AI to cheat and become "learned". AI can find the books to read but you still have to read them and understand the ideas.
There was connotation of breadth as opposed to depth with being "learned".
I think we also have to forget about "the real world". Being "learned" automatically is going to inherit dealing with "the real world" because the real world is always changing and that is exactly why breadth should be the focus going forward more than the depth of the research university model.
Of course, in a society so dominated by credentialism, credentialed people are going to hate AI because it will obviously let anyone cheat at the credential they put so much time and effort into. This doesn't need to be dressed up in some "think of the children" argument.
Claude to me is the greatest thing since sliced bread that increases my "learnedness" every single day but I also am a drop out that invested basically nothing in being a credentialed person.
It read like an ads.
Why push an ads?
A person who has something to say often has trouble stopping writing. Outsourcing writing to AI then feels like the opposite, as if the author doesn't care but wants to just spew some content.
Uh, by also avoiding it entirely?
> He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them.
I'm empathetic to the student: I'd bet a large majority of employers/careers he's researching right now are making a lot of press noise about "the importance of AI" and how "it's a necessary part of the workplace now." Can you really expect someone in his shoes to avoid it entirely?
...because I'm that I'm writing this article be a AI himself...