studies published between 2022 and 2025 that examined the use of GenAI in relation to students
173 records (studies) were included in the review
It was garbage before LLMs got good, and the deep thinking models leapfrog whatever it used to be in its heydey.
How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof? It seems to have been dreamed out of nowhere
Why are there advertisements for a shampoo containing caffeine? Does caffeine do something useful other than when you drink it?
What happens in sense and sensibility?
All of them give a decent answer, with the ability to ask follow ups. Eg, how does S&S compare with Pride and Prejudice? What about more recent novels connecting romantic choices with economic choices?
All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.
At the start of the millennium, Google search changed everything about how I look for information. Now it seems outdated.
Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there, e.g. "Nutris(c) is proven to be better than caffeine for haircare"
I wonder how well a company could establish something like Danone's health-claim for Activia [1] in an AI without ever being clearly accountable for it...
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2010/12/...
For the time being, AI seems to be doing a much better job in most cases, so as we say: So long Google!
Mind you much of the existence of Google has been this kind of unstable arms race, from the early days of the ad-free home page to introducing pagerank as the first attempt against linkspam SEO.
Children probably use more critical thinking in the playground and interacting with other children than in class, because classwork is mostly slop anyway.
LLMs are not going to one shot answers in Minecraft through the chat UI. Possibly a more effective resource than checkbox activities at teaching "critical thinking" (abused term in education).
The reason I started those conversations was specifically around when children are learning critical thinking skills. When we broke down exactly what types of exercises teach those skills, it surprised me to find that it starts way earlier than it used to. It is now a late elementary school topic, when it used to be high school.
That doesn't mean that slop isn't creeping into the classroom - it is. But what to do about it is a completely different conversation when it is pushed down from on top vs. assuming teachers are choosing it.
I never asked them to waste additional resources by injecting my blunt keyword-query into an AI-cluster and guesstimate a well-formed article from that.
But here I am, with (elder) relatives sending me Google search-results on topics like they are proper articles...
For quick reference, sometimes it’s pretty good! The problem is that obviously you can’t dedicate a lot of compute or additional tools for checking those answers so most of it can’t really be trusted.
ls612•54m ago
codedokode•46m ago
netdevphoenix•38m ago
luka598•32m ago
Macha•24m ago
Gareth321•22m ago
One of the more horrifying stories to read was about [Code Yellow back in 2019.](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-2019-code-yellow-blurr...) Google's algorithms were getting too good. Users were finding what they wanted too fast. They'd type in their query, the first result was good, then the user would close the tab. For Google, this meant less ad revenue. They wanted users to stay on Google for longer. *So they chose to degrade the algorithm quality.* Users would have to click multiple links to find the information they wanted, and inside every link was ads served by Google. This is one of the pivotal moments in one of the worst cases of enshitification in software history.
amelius•31m ago
Tade0•26m ago
I attempted to google this a few years ago to no avail.
o_m•18m ago
My coworkers use Google and often quote back the AI summary me instead of checking the source and referring to that. It's scary seeing even those with higher education behave like this.