America's two largest school districts impose AI moratoriums
techpolicy.press
techpolicy.press
If anything, it sounds like (you think that) they need to be more thoughtful and not just throw every new technology and technique at the kids and see if it works.
I’m not trying to nitpick, but slow down, think, and measure before acting seems like clearer advice. Really what you are fighting is assuming that new technology is useful and just trying out various ad hoc ways to discover how to realize that usefulness.
Also think it's extremely unethical to experiment on school children using tools or methods that can be detrimental to their development (see chromebook debacle, moving away from phonics). We kinda know what works very well in a public education setting, the constant experimentation does not help.
Experiment on adults that can consent, not children.
What? Good approaches, definitionally, have quite a lot of staying power. This is true in most fields but especially in education where, it turns out, we don't really figure out net new approaches that are much better than the last ones very frequently.
The Los Angeles public school system will vastly restrict the use of AI at all grade levels, reported the NY Times and others. The news of the ban — which oddly had to be coaxed out of LAUSD employees (YouTube) at a meeting of the LAUSD School Board Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee — stunningly came as a complete surprise to both the LAUSD Board and K-12 AI usage protestors...
I’m not sure I disagree with this.
Schools need to figure out how to integrate it well in a way that both helps kids learn and teaches them how to use this new tool productively. I don’t think that’s been done yet. It’s not a bad idea to just keep it out until we figure it out, or there’s a risk of just slathering AI all over everything mindlessly.
At the very least it could be a giant waste of money. Schools don’t need to be spending their often limited funds thrashing around or chasing fads.
The ban should be lifted once educators figure out what to do with this stuff.
Students who use it correctly > students who don't use it > students who use it incorrectly
tbh im fatigued of the general public being beta testers for companies.
New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools
In my master's they gave me anything I wanted, laptop, internet, whatever. Gave 2 stupid hard problems.
That's the future.
Or maybe there was more to it?
Don't force seatbelts, those who don't want to wear are not going to
Don't try to restrict $A, it's against personal freedom/liberty that us at $corporate love.
Clearly, laws have a not insignificant effect, even if you could easily ignore them.
But I agree laws have a huge effect.
I've seen the same moral panic during the commodification of Internet access in my country in mid 00's -- "students are going to cheat on their homework and become dumb!!1", blah-blah-blah-fart-blah. you only pretend to care about kids to push your politics.
i wonder why that is. what kind of attitude towards the value of education would allow this. grok help me out here
What absolute horseshit
I have met a lot of teachers in my life and I don't think I have ever met one that was remotely indifferent to their students. Its not like they're getting into it for the money :/
Meanwhile, private schools who have both budget and drive will teach kids who can afford it and teach them proper railguarding against such tools. Did I get your point of view correct?
There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured. So why not hold the ones already using our money accountable?
there isn't. AI labs don't give a flying fuck about kids, underprivileged or otherwise -- why should they? LLMs being useful for education is a side effect of them being developed to replace knowledge workers. but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.
>and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured
by whom? the LLM market is delightfully competitive. and even if one of the labs makes a breakthrough and jacks up the prices on their SOTA, the rest of them won't just disappear.
I'm not suggesting we replace schools with LLMs. no one sane does. I'm just stating something that's been extremely obvious since GPT-4 almost 4 years ago -- LLMs are an incredibly useful tool for learning. fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been -- I'm old enough to have witnessed Soviet-bred boomers yelling at those clouds, and I'm baffled to see various Internet folx fighting the same fight using the same arguments. "we should fund schools better instead" is not going to happen. it was never going to happen even if LLMs didn't happen.
I'm not arguing usefulness. We have many useful tools, programs, and institutions out there. I'm sure some parts of this community directly contributed to such tech.
I'm arguing cost. Costs raise too much (and as you mention, they don't give a flying fuck about those who can't afford it) and we throw LLMs into the pile of "useful yet inaccessible" tools that increases the disparity of the passing and failing kids. So we're back to square one.
>by whom
Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public, and we've seen this playbook being run. They compete until competitors peter out, or they collude to make sure prices all increase in coordination. It's happening now with memory, happened years back with the streaming wars. I see no reason why LLMs are different.
>fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been.
I'm simply asking two questions long term
1. Who foots the bill?
2. Who gets the benefit.
From what I see you haven't answered #2. And for #1 you're just hoping competition keeps prices low despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs. Something's going to give, and history tells me it's not going to be the privileged families.
what I meant is that there isn't a singular entity capable of doing such a rag pull. even if/when closedai and misanthropic do it, open-weights models obviously won't follow.
>Who foots the bill?
primary schoolers don't need $50/1M SOTA. dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough, and even models that can run on consumer hardware are enough for great many things if you know their limitations.
>Who gets the benefit.
students who use it.
again, a LLM can essentially act as a fairly proficient and infinitely patient tutor on every subject, and you have unlimited access to it. that's the application I see for them in education. it would've been amazing to me to have that when I was in school.
>despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs
not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.
And do you trust companies to keep subsidizing the "cheap" models? The reason for the memory crisis isn't due to consumer DRAM but affects it nonetheless.
Remember, the kinds of families being talked about here are on districts that apparently cannot afford basic learning supplies and it's a "fantasy" to get them more funding. Who's footing the bill?
>and you have unlimited access to it.
You keep handwaving the costs but not providing good argument for who's covering it. There's no such thing as a free (or in this case, unlimited) lunch. A disadvantaged family may not be able to bear yet another subscription (and again, that train has already left on subscription based syst3ms), a school district would need to fund this for thousands of students, likely funded by property taxes.
>not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.
Yes. Their earnings reports reflect this. The companies are running defecits to fund this. They are the ones subsidizing it.
We all know that will not last forever in this post ZIRP economy. Proponents for AI love to argue about the capabilities in 3-5 years whenever flaws in AI models arise, but seem sheepish to talk about the costs and monetization models. But the latter is the real important part when talking on the scale of an entire education system. I think we can all agree that the products that win such educational bids are rarely the highest quality ones.
There's also matters of curriculum, but I'm not versed enough to advise on that issue directly. The small amounts of reading I've done on it suggests that other states need to swallow their pride and look to the statss improving for wisdom.
I’m not saying you can’t be intelligent in a world of LLMs but people who use the calculator analogy underscore the fact that the LLM isn’t just eliminating the drudgery of one subdomain of mechanical problem solving — every problem is one an LLM can provide and answer for, including what you should learn, what problems you should solve, what your next conversation with the LLM should be about. So they do pose at least a threat of people truly offloading indefinite amounts of their own critical thinking to models, and there’s also danger that such people will in general still be competent enough often enough (due to LLM competence) that they are hard to screen out of key decision making roles or even from highly profitable roles.
I'm not sure what to tell you if you think the LLM solves for novel thinking.
Can you plot a graph from an equation by hand?
If you can't, but you can use a graphing calculator to plot the graph then it seems like it has led to you not learning that skill.
And being able to look at an equation and plot a graph in your head is pretty valuable imo
A frankly hilarious statement given several key facts:
* You don't get and in fact are usually barred from using a graphing calculator outside of coursework designed around it
* Even when you DO use one, it is very often after years upon years of drawing graphs yourself. Analogous to LLMs even moreso than your core example, because to make use of an LLM in a way that is actually productive, you DO need to know what you're talking about with it, to suss out when it's made some bullshit up.