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Comment by kenforthewin | Hacker News Reader

> A study by MIT found that students who use AI to write show far less brain activity than those who used classic Google searching (with AI off) or those who used neither. Other studies find that students who use AI retain far less of the information that ends up in their writing, possibly as a result of “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.”

I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

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I'd love to see the 'AI as personal tutor' approach. Even incorporating things like spaced repetition or the testing effect, or evaluating free-written responses.

A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.

The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.

So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.

I don’t think this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because learning still requires struggling even under the best of personal tutors. For most of the “80%” it requires some level of compulsion and submitting to authority that would be bad PR for a product, and that people won’t be very accepting of, coming from an automation.

I'd say "some learning" -- I've learned how to operate and maintain an excavator from YouTube without significant struggle. otoh it might be difficult to learn linear algebra that way. But otooh an LLM might be far better than YouTube at teaching mathematics, while being orders of magnitude less costly than a real teacher. Even in the USA proper mathematics teachers are unavailable in many areas.

The discussion was about people who right now prefer to use AI for cheating (or for avoiding work) rather than for learning. I don’t think that a “personal tutor” mode would significantly change these dynamics without some form of coercion.

That professor at Brown I think was able to verify that all but one of like 90 students had used AI on the midterm. The heroic naïf improved on the final. The part you miss, if I follow, is that the going view is that youre a chump if you don’t.

It really is absolutely clear that higher education is over for good unless radical measures are taken. You can calculate the economic conquences. Colleagues are adopting 19th c tech and it may be well for universities to enforce them across the board https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessm...

> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.

> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.

yeah, I think we have plenty of evidence that a certain sector of the population absolutely "vibe codes" life.

Dunno about that. I can fix a lot more stuff around the house thanks to YouTube. I have picked up a bunch of programming knowledge via the internet that I never would have without it. The internet has delivered on a lot of its promises.

Im not sure if the internet made anyone dumber. It is just early on the average idiot self selected out of internet usage and there wasn't as much corporate or advertising money it to be worth manipulating.

AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations.

Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.

This sounds like a very much wanted release of mental stress to me.

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