I already feel disrespected in powerpoint presentations where they clearly haven't practiced it for a long time and seem to be discovering the slides and coming up with the argument they want to make on the spot. I usually get up and leave.

  [the slideshow] was missing important tested material, repetitive, and just totally airy and meaningless. Just slide after slide of the same handful of sentences rephrased with random loosely related stock photos. 

I keep telling people here that reddit is actually an underappreciated goldmine, but I guess feeling better than others feels too good to pass on.

In my mind, reddit is like of HN, except instead of being just tech and business oriented people, it's every subject under the sun. Most of it is garbage (like on HN) but if you're willing to search it's a goldmine.

Somehow though, this actually might be the best time to for learners, to sit down and engage with topics and don’t be distracted by formal stuff (degrees, grades, points) because the latter is becoming more meaningless with each token being sent down the drain.

Western countries have better conditions than much of the world for a variety of reasons, but among them is education and culture.

Raising the next generation to outsource all thinking to AI and form a culture around influencing people 45 seconds at a time will destroy those prerequisites to our better lifestyle, and it will be downhill from there.

You might argue that the AI can be a mentor or can guide society appropriately. That's not wholly untrue, but if AI is "a bicycle for the mind", you still have to have the willingness and vision to go someplace with it. If you've never thought for yourself, never learned anything independently, I just don't see how people will avoid using AI to be "stupid faster".

IIRC, it may be better to have the same number of real humans focussing on fewer pupils. Even when they're using VLMs as assistants.

Students:

While humans max out at a higher skill level than VLMs, I suspect that most (not all!) people who would otherwise have finished education at their local mandatory school leaving age, may be better off finishing school as soon as they can use a VLM.

But also #1: There's also a question of apprenticeships over the current schooling system. Robotics' AI are not as advanced as VLMs, so while plumbing will get solved eventually (and a tentacle robot arm with a camera in each "finger" is clearly superior to our human arms in tight spaces), right now it still looks like a sane thing to train in.

But also #2: Telling who is and isn't getting anything out of the education system is really hard; not only in historical systems like the UK's old eleven-plus exams, but today after university graduation when it can sometimes take a bit of effort to detect that someone only got a degree for the prestige and didn't really learn anything.

The current US administration has already started this process.

A teaching culture of thinking that all you have to do is graduate students + a learning culture of thinking all you have to do is graduate.

This already was at an 8. Got dialled up to 11 during covid. And somehow dialled up to 21 after ChatGPT.

Normally, broken things can hobble along for a very long time. But the strain is so intense on what has become of education that my current guess is that the chickens will come to roost on this one sometime 2026 to 2027.

We are avoiding work that we don't want to do and therefore saving time, which is precisely what technology promised would help us do.

The system we have is now legacy: https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/student-flaunts-use-of-chatgpt-...

Link: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi...)

  1. One cannot not communicate

  2. Every communication has a content and relationship
     aspect such that the latter classifies the former
     and is therefore a metacommunication

  3. The nature of a relationship is dependent on the
     punctuation of the partners' communication procedures

  4. Human communication involves both digital and analog
     modalities

  5. Inter-human communication procedures are either
     symmetric or complementary

This is a dramatic and expensive way to learn they had different ideas of their relationship!

Of course, in a teacher/student situation, it's the teacher's job to make it clear to the students what the relationship is. Otherwise you risk relationship-damaging "surprises" like this.

Even ignoring the normative question of what a teacher Should™ do in that situation, it was counterproductive. Whatever benefit the teacher thought AI would provide, they'd (hopefully) agree it was outweighed by the cost to their relationship w/ students. All future interactions w/ those students will now be X% harder.

There's a kind of technical rationale which says that if (1) the GOAL is to improve the student's output and (2) I would normally do that by giving one or more rounds of feedback and waiting for the student to incorporate it then (3) I should use AI because it will help us reach that goal faster and more efficiently.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”

The act of receiving and incorporating feedback is not "inefficient", especially not in a school setting. The consummation of that process is part of the goal. Maybe the most important part!

Full Dewey quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44597741

The work load is making people create or extend their work using LLMs, and the reviewers/managers are also overloaded and don't have enough time to go through it so they feed it to an LLM to get a summary, that later is pushed somewhere else to feed another process... becoming a "broken telephone" business process were nobody really knows the detail of what's going on, and it's just LLMs feeding another LLMs in an eternally absurd process.

(Very anecdotal, local-to-the-Netherlands experience, of course.)

Things being a little bit wrong is not a huge problem. Much worse is if LLMs remove all the rigor and grit from education, the hard work to learn how to recognize facts.

Education is secondary to a teachers job …. the real issue is managing the classroom without disruption

If you object, it's because you hate children.

Eventually, there are no more misbehaving kids, there are misbehaving parents who children are reporting to the trusted phones who taught them about the world, the phones that aligned the values of your children with the values of the people who paid the people who designed the system.

Just add a student compliance add-on subscription.

Buses will be driven by AI as well, so they'll only see their parents for 10 minutes in the morning and for an hour or so during the occasional dinners they eat together, and otherwise kids will be entirely alienated and left alone.

But do not worry! There will be an AI companion for them to talk to at all hours, a nanny AI, or a nAInny, one that starts as a nanny when they are infants and will gradually grow into an educator, confidante, and true friend that will never betray them.

That nAInny will network with other nAInnies to find mates for their charges, coordinate dates, ensure that no hanky-panky goes on until they graduate college and get married, and will be there together to give pointers and instructions during the act of coitus to enhance the likelihood of producing offspring that their fellow nAInnys will get to take care of.

A truly symbiotic relationship where the humans involved never have any agency but never need it as their lives are happy and perfect in every way.

If you don't want to participate in that, you will be removed as an obstacle to the true happiness of the human race.

As a former teacher, I know you need to have a good grasp of the material you are using in order to help students understand it. The material should also be in a similarly structured form thoughout a course, which will reinforce the expectations of the students, making their mental load lesser. The only way to do this is to prepare the material yourself.

Material created by LLM will have the issues you mentioned, yes, but it will also be less easy to teach, for the reasons mentioned above. In the US, where teaching is already in a terrible state, I wouldn't be surprised if this is accepted quietly, but it will have a long lasting negative impact on learning outcomes.

If we project this forward, a reliance on AI tools might also create a lower expectation of the quality of the material, which will drag the rest of the material down as well. This mirrors the rise of expendable mass produced products when we moved the knowledge needed to produce goods from workers to factory machines.

Commodities are one thing, you could argue that the decrease in quality is offset by volume (I wouldn't, but you could), but for teaching? Not a good idea. At most, let the students know how to use LLMs to look for information, and warn them of hallucinations and not being able to find the sources.

Smaller institutions are indeed better, but they are also less efficient. It's no wonder that only rich families can afford institutions like that.

Learning is hard, it's a struggle. Why learn when you can not learn?

If there are serious societal issues that it can cause at the moment I wonder why it was released before being perfected, but then, what does perfected even look like? The product is darn good at the moment.

Looking around me, engineers do not understand that. Instead, they have exactly same overblown expectations and actively push for LLM everywhere. They will call you ludite if you say anything else.

Sounds similar to social media.

Otherwise, yes, I am very concerned about society's use of LLMs -- particularly young people (students).

But now the very teachers themselves... Frankly, not surprised.

I've been using it to make me a much better tutor/mentor. But the cases outlined in (I'm assuming) the public education sector are very, very worrisome.

It is hilarious though that humans are just ready to slurp up any opportunity to just start shitting all over their work and their coworkers and students. Less time spent and caring?! yes please! then they become full time salesmen of it to everyone else, and then the social interaction problems just explode. Tribal standoffs, create entirely new tribes, plotting and deception to continue getting what they have a taste of.

Infighting distractions are so convenient as the government guts everything they work under

the good times are over, it happens. i remember watching that Dall-E come out and feeling sorry for graphic designers, gloating in the knowledge programming was too complex to automate. then they automated it.

a human is still required in the loop for vibe coding, as its fairly fuckin useless without guidance, but i can see that changing too

To get good results out of an LLM you need to determine exactly what the system needs to do and how it should work.

That's programming! We just don't have to type all the semicolons ourselves any more.

I am going to propose that no one should feel pressure to use any of the generative coding tools if they don't want to.

Why is "unlevel" in quotes? When it comes to physical activities, biological males have a huge advantage over biological females; high school boys routinely beat professional adult women's sport teams.

> But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade.

I agree that this is a bigger problem than trans kids in sports. I think people are less upset about this because

1. It's a more recent development 2. They think that the kids using AI are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage, albeit one that will only become apparent after they graduate.

In client projects we see two hard costs pop up: 1. Human review time ⟶ still 2–4 min per 1 k tokens because hallucination isn’t solved. 2. Inference \$: for a 70 B model at 16 k context you pay ~\$0.12 per 1 k tokens — cheap for generation, expensive for bulk reading.

So yes, AI will read for us, but whoever owns the *attention budget + validation loop* still controls comprehension. That’s where new leverage lives.