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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

The primary use case of universities are to produce a generation that can contribute to the society in a meaningful and positive manner. Nowadays in-order to do that, AI literacy is a must for graduates just like it was 15 years ago when it was a must to have computer literacy.

AI is a tool like internet was and it's the responsibility of the curriculum to teach proper usage of that tool rather than fighting against it.

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We still teach primary school children how to do addition, despite the fact that during their working life they'll have access to a calculator virtually all of the time. A decade ago posting your CS assignment on StackOverflow and handing in the top answer was considered cheating, despite professional software developers doing pretty much that any time they ran into something unusually tricky. Why teach students differentiation when they can just put "derivative of x^2" in WolframAlpha?

Universities are supposed to primarily teach understanding, not basic tool use. Yes, tool use should be part of your education as well, but that's only a small fraction of it. A single "prompting AI to do X" course is probably more than enough. But if you completely skip the fundamentals and make the students fully dependent on the tools, how could they possibly contribute to building the next generation of tools, verify the output of the tools, or transcend the tools?

Yeah, they should indeed be teaching proper AI use as well, but in practice the easy access to AI is making it virtually impossible to teach the fundamentals, and that's the real problem here.

> Yeah, they should indeed be teaching proper AI use as well

That's all I'm saying. If a student wants to cheat then they are going to do it regardless if AI exists or not. That's not something anyone can control. It's a decision made by the student and they would face the consequences down the line in their life.

However, if the proper usage of AI tools are taught in university and and the usage is allowed, any student that actually wants to learn, that would be a gold mine. I wish we had AI when I was in college. Being a visual learner, that would have made my life so much easier to understand complex concepts and algorithms with nice animations and diagrams generated with AI.

The analogies to prior technologies aren't insightful. The advent of LLMs has some similarities to the appearance of the internet, and very significant differences. Calling it a "tool" is also far too reductive. What kind of tool that existed before just writes everything for you? Is that the same kind of tool as a nailgun or a text editor? The "proper usage" that has to be learned is to learn to think for yourself before you get used to the word-bot doing all the thinking for you.

Yep. That's the premise of this article. The writer used to be the dean of humanities at University of Utah (great school, much of AI exists thanks to their work on CompGraphics, HPC, and Teapots) and is basically arguing that humanites and social science (HSS) programs need to build that kind of literacy.

A generation ago you saw similar resistance to the internet from HSS programs.

> AI is a tool like internet was

until it was overrun by unverified AI slop. Let's just get the slop from the source!

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