Comment by fny
2 years ago
In time, this quirk and others* will disappear.
I’ve recently wondered whether it makes more sense to have AIs teach more at home and have classrooms evaluate more.
Another thought is that people will still need knowledge to interact with an LLM in any meaningful way. It’s akin to doing research with a brilliant professor: an illiterate partner will have no idea even what to ask.
*If you repeatedly prompt an LLM to “Make a sentence using the verb V in tense T in language L” with zero context, the example sentences are surprisingly related for a single verb.
For example, “You must do your homework tonight”; “He must do his homework to pass the test”; “They must do their homework tonight”.
That is an interesting idea. Learn to love the bomb: mark the prompt not the essay?
"Your assignment class is to write a comprehensive 250 word prompt that covers the main topics we've been discussing about the causes for WW1. You should assess the resulting essay to ensure that it covers X, Y, and Z in it's output, being sure to discuss foo and bar. Write a brief 500 word analysis of what you tried and your prompt's effectiveness and be prepared to discuss in class what worked well and what you needed to change in your prompt."
What's stopping students from using an LLM to write the prompt and analysis? Mentioning the topics discussed in class and any key points could easily be part of the initial prompt.
The in-person discussion is key, but at that point why do you need a written essay?
These tools radically change the concept of knowledge. If information can be looked up at any moment, why does it need to exist in our brains?
We can argue that knowledge enhances our reasoning capabilities, but our entire education system is not built for assessing reasoning, but how good we are at recalling information. So we need to make core changes to how we approach education if we ever want to coexist with this technology.
Well the point is to make them think about the prompt. I don't care if someone prompts to come up with a second prompt to get the answer, they need to input and refine to make it fit the goal. So by setting fairly stringent objectives for what the AI needs to generate, you need to be quite specific to engineer the prompt and think about what it needs. And then you need to look at what it said and qualify it somehow to decide if it is good enough - sure you could use a LLM for that too, but what is the prompt for that? You'll need to teach the second LLM what to analyse in the output of the first LLM to meet the requirements of the assignment, so the prompt(s) becomes the essays of yesterday in terms of academic work/thought for the student.
That's the point of what I was getting at - they're going to use AI regardless, so at least work with it rather than against it.
1 reply →
>If information can be looked up at any moment, why does it need to exist in our brains?
Because creativity involves making connections between seemingly unrelated knowledge. For a good example, consider Richard F. Lyon's 1980 optical mouse design:
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReport...
One important innovation here is lateral inhibition between neighboring sensor elements, which gives fast and cheap contrast enhancement and automatic gain control. This was inspired by the behavior of cells in biological eyes. Lyon needed both biology and electronic engineering knowledge simultaneously to make the connection. Looking things up wouldn't have helped because it would have only provided one field of knowledge at a time.
1 reply →
I think you are thinking in the right direction. Don’t fight gravity (AI) - gravity will win. Instead, change the system so that we (and the students) work with gravity rather than against it.
To be honest, for some children, even books are better teachers than classrooms with other teenagers constantly disrupting the class with teachers not being able to teach nor being able to punish the disruptive children due to modern regulatory burden, which removes total accountability from children.
Our classrooms have already been ruined, not just in america but worldwide. AI will be great for the decent, obedient, smart kids as a tool to extend themselves learning wise, those kids can read books at home, learn, ask questions to AI that immediately generates visuals to explain concepts use agentic model to detect the core of the child’s doubt about a topic in background thinking and iteratively resolve all the issues.
But the saddest part of all this to me, is it’ll never be able to help the disruptive kids with often broken households with no one to look after them, no one to lead them to the right path, the more at-home solutions will get better, the creamy top layer of children will distance themselves from broken community classroom education, and it’ll further divide us all as a society.
To think of that inevitable future, it breaks my heart. AIs can be far better evaluators than classrooms, with connected cameras, recognition systems, anti-cheat solutions to then automatically review a child’s progress, capability, depth of knowledge about systems, and can do it in a more standardized way to benchmark all of america’s children reliably than teachers and state level evaluation exams we have now.
CommonCore was meant to solve this, its been a disaster, i think the future of AI is more prominent in Evaluation than it is in Learning, learning wise i think it is doomed anyways, simply because 70% of kids are addicted to doomscrolling social media, have been habituated to bad disruptive behaviours, and are left unsupervised as “iPad children” by modern day unserious parents. I dont see AI solving any of that anytime soon, only pragmatic human solutions could possibly solve that, with communities taking a stand to reverse these declining trends.
"unserious parents" looks to me like we are attempting to optimise for maximum productive potential in a competitive, zero sum human labour market.
If we're lucky, AI may also disrupt some core assumptions about what a childhood should be.
I'd love to not be forced to enlist my child in the state sponsored training program for the white collar meat grinder, competing against ritalin packing tiger moms, just for the chance to potentially avoid resource scarcity later in life.
> are left unsupervised as “iPad children” by modern day unserious parents
They were left unsupervised on the street before, I’m not sure if there’s significant difference in what the people then and now thought.
>> Our classrooms have already been ruined, not just in america but worldwide.
Hmm ..citation?