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usonian

(13,773 posts)
Fri Jun 14, 2024, 10:10 AM Jun 2024

AI is making children dumb as ****.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1df6qep/ai_is_making_children_dumb_as_fuck/

Flagged at Reddit, so no further comments, and the OP content was deleted by moderators. (talk about controversial)

AND the post at Hacker News that references this was also flagged, so no more comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40678990

But the comments stand. Many horror stories from education and business.

Some random ones:

Reddit:
I give them questions directly based on an activity that we just did in class, and they still try to ask Google.

Hacker News:


I always find that whenever such topics come up for discussion Ted Gray had the best take - https://theodoregray.com/BrainRot/.

With AI and specifically LLMs, I feel many of the points raised here about 25 years ago still stands. Any LLM based learning isn't meant to push students into thinking about the problem or even guiding students along the path to the correct answer. It's mostly about returning some answer -- mostly right but not really of a good quality. As pointed out in Ted Gray's article, any assisted learning mechanism should work towards making the student think about the problem at hand and reason their way through it. It's an aide to the human teacher because, it being a machine and most importantly software, can adapt to each and every single student's ability and work at the student's pace instead of 3 periods of an hour each per week. An LLM by definition is the opposite. It gives you the next most probable character without any idea of what it's saying. There is a lot of work being done on this ofc, but what's available today isn't a reasoning aide/teacher.


To me, the question is: Do we "sediment" machine-generated information and skills and move onward and upward to more creative thinking, or do we settle for the quick answer? Do we only prompt the machine for answers, or use a vast array of information, filtering out the mere mimicry, and use that information as prompts to our own sentient and human/humane consciousness to come up with solutions to real human problems and needs, rather than my current dilemma: how to use technology to cure the problems that greedy and self-centered people have created, leveraging technology "against humanity"?

You know their names.

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AI is making children dumb as ****. (Original Post) usonian Jun 2024 OP
At some point AI will become completely stupid Ocelot II Jun 2024 #1
Some claim that's already happening. I don't disagree. ❤️ littlemissmartypants Jun 2024 #2

Ocelot II

(120,815 posts)
1. At some point AI will become completely stupid
Fri Jun 14, 2024, 10:11 AM
Jun 2024

because its only references will be the ones it generated. It will eat itself.

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