Comment by opto
6 days ago
I am an instructor who helps deliver an apprenticeship. My new boss has been in our industry for about 20 years and is one of the most respected people in our company. They've just joined us to teach and are off doing a two week course. On the first day she was told to let AI write all of her lesson plans, and then feed the lesson plans to AI to make her slides...
Hopefully she rejects all this out of hand, but if she doesn't it'll mean that none of our trainees get the benefit of her experience, who she is as a person, and what she has to pass onto them.
We have 6 monthly reviews as instructors where we are told the same thing. "How could you use AI for your teaching?"
They don't even feel the need to justify why this would be desirable, or is needed at all. It's just pure bandwagonning. Unbelievably, most of my coworkers are extremely positive about AI, although none of them have told me they use it for anything besides preparing their lessons for them — they just use it instead of having to think, or spend time preparing...the only important thing they do at work.
It makes no sense to me.
I’m teaching a class at a university in Japan (on AI-related issues, as it happens). I’ve been teaching for more than 40 years, but at 106 registered students this is by far the largest class I have ever taught. AI tools are very helpful for class management, such as keeping track of attendance and homework submissions.
I have to consciously avoid using AI for more cognitive tasks, though. It would be very tempting to have Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini summarize, classify, and grade the students’ assignments, write individual feedback, prepare my lesson plans, etc. However, I know that my engagement with the material and with the students would suffer. I also want to show the students that they are learning together with me and with each other, not with bots.
I am semiretired and have a light teaching load that gives me plenty of time to prepare for class. I can see that full-time teachers might find it hard to resist the lure of offloading their thinking to AI.
I've been a teacher (most of the time a college professor) for...a long time. Nowadays, when preparing a new course, I definitely work with AI: "Here's what I want, and who my audience is - give me a course outline".
That gives me a starting point. Of course, I modify it. Maybe I bounce back and forth to the AI for further refinements and suggestions, but ultimately I have to be happy with the result.
When prepping the individual lessons, the biggest time saver is coming up with examples to illustrate particular points. I could do this alone, but sometimes that involves staring at a blank screen for a while. It is faster to ask the AI for suggestions, pick the one I like, and refine it further myself.
AI is a tool. Use it appropriately.
> AI is a tool. Use it appropriately
Yes, but no room is made for people who see no use for it. There is a forced-consensus that this technology is useful, which I have to combat against at work.
We teach in a very different environment, but your use sounds typical of my colleagues. "I ask it for suggestions and pick one", but nobody seems to wonder about what is lost when we shrink the horizon of what we will teach to the most likely outputs from a chatbot, one of which we will use.
Maybe this makes more sense in other fields. I have to prepare people to work in the shipping industry, in extremely dangerous roles where they will be operating heavy machinery, steering ships, driving cranes etc. The fact is that AI knows next to nothing about this field because an AI cannot experience handling a ship in rough weather, has never secured a boat to a ship's side with the rain and wind in its face.
Yet, when people are brought in to instruct our trainees, they are told to "tell AI what you want and pick one of the suggestions", in the best case, or just give over everything to the AI in the worst case. And nobody seems to be able to explain why this is a better way of working than sitting with a pen and paper, brainstorming some ideas for a lesson based on your real experiences, and then delivering it. The only justification I'm ever given is your one, "I pick from a list so I am really still in control", "it's quicker and I don't have to think as hard or as long", "it's better at making slides or writing good-sounding (to management and auditors) lesson plans". No-one ever seems to justify it by saying it is genuinely a better experience for the trainees.
> Yes, but no room is made for people who see no use for it. There is a forced-consensus that this technology is useful, which I have to combat against at work.
This is the crux of the issue -- The technology is useful. Using it appropriately is probably the thing that people are ignoring, but you're conflating one and the other in your comment.
It is not useful to you in this case, and complain that it is an overall detriment in your industry. Those are fine and reasonable statements and conditions, and I see no reason to disagree with them... But your first statement, people who see no use for it? That is, to me, as off-putting an opinion as the consequence-unaware hypebeasts who are running OpenClaw with access to their trading accounts and can't see why others aren't.
I sympathise with the idea that everyone wants to use the new hammer and so is treating every problem like a nail, but hammers are still pretty good tools. (And you can ignore the ex-NFT-fans hammering on their dicks in the corner.)
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