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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

It's like banning teachers or textbooks from school. LLMs are the single greatest learning technology ever created.

Saying that a human teacher is equivalent to an LLM is derogatory to the teachers and exaggerating the capabilities of the LLM. I say this as someone who uses these things daily in my work and personal life. Let's not murky the waters with complete falsehoods

LLMs have been better than many teachers I've had in my life. To no fault of the teachers, it's hard to compete with something that has understanding of every subject, is hooked up to the internet, and is given 1:1 time with the person learning at any time of the day, answering promptly.

LLMs have enormous capacity for supporting a person who is motivated to learn and wants individualized support and instruction. That doesn’t describe all students and there’s no reason why seat time in the classroom should be used that way - students can still use an LLM to help them learn if they’re motivated to do that, but not during class.

Sure, classroom sizes can be a detriment to those that require more hands on instruction time. But that's not everyone and not every school suffers from overcrowding.

LLMs are also more flattering

your absolutely right!

Confidently pretends to have understanding of every subject but is frequently spectacularly wrong

LLMs are very good at convincing people they are learning, because they give answers quickly and fairly accurately. But that makes them bad teachers, not better teachers. The fact that LLMs are good problem solvers is to their detriment when it comes to teaching. We don't want to solve problems in this domain, we want to slowly trickle information and build practice so students can solve problems.

I think people conflate productivity for learning. LLMs can greatly help with productivity. But... so can hiring an employee. Well, what have you learned? Nothing, you outsourced 90% of it. You decidedly learned less than if you were less productive and did it yourself.

If kids use them for learning and not just cheating. You have to learn how to learn and how to think for yourself before you can do that

LLMs can teach you that too. You do not need to learn that first.

They can, but I don't think we are there yet. No need to sending taxpayer dollars to silicon valley on educating the next generation using a new technology that hasn't proven itself in education yet.

LLMs greatly remove the social aspect of the teacher-student relationship. They are probably fine for tutoring and replacing things like Khan Academy but they are no substitute for a human teacher.

Are you sure that taking shortcuts to information isn't potentially doing more damage to learning?

Being able to access information faster is not really a problem. I don't know anybody that was super upset that the encyclopedia came on a bunch of CD roms instead of bound volumes.

Not having the skills to assess the accuracy / validity of the information you accessed at breakneck speed however is going to be the downfall of us all.

Ai just made it easier to generate misinformation faster. We were already suffering from the blight of misinformation spreading through various media channels.

If AI can be used to better teach effective media and information literacy, we should be rolling that out in schools.

But it sounds like AI in public schools is largely just being used for speed running homework.

Yeah, it's the speed-running homework and unchecked potential for misinformation that are really problematic. I agree that if it was only a more efficient and accessible repository of information, it wouldn't be nearly as bad, and that's partly what I was getting at in my top-comment (the "may be a version of AI that helps people learn" part).

technology seems to bifurcate outcomes - the top students seem to get much better than previous cohorts but the rest of them seem to get a lot worse.

I don't want the government to be forcing people into the worse outcome just to make outcomes more equal.

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