Comment by jdprgm
1 day ago
I don't understand the rationale trying to equate AI with social media here. Nobody really was ever arguing social media would somehow be good for education or even particularly relevant.
Personally I think AI at least has the potential to be one of the greatest tools to have a positive impact on education. We basically democratized access to an infinitely patient and capable high level tutor that can tackle any topic at any level of abstraction.
I regularly, like at least several times a day, find myself doing random deep dives on some topic triggered by some question where prior maybe I would have read a wiki page or just dismissed it due to the barrier of entry to get to what I was interested in.
The problem I have is that any time I ask about things in or adjacent to my own areas of expertise, it gets something important about those things wrong around 1/3 of the time.
I've also had a number of experiences asking it e.g. "where do I disable this behavior on MacOS", it being confidently wrong until I finally show it a screenshot proving it wrong, only for it to backpedal and say, "Oh, I see, I was thinking of iOS."
If you're trying to learn, confidently bad information is worse than no information. There was no "deep dive" unless you exit the chat and actually check real sources.
potential is the key word.