Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in a negative way, then we're not focusing on the right things to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) text they're able to spit out, this is what you get.

The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.

Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.

You gave them a task, they used their imagination to apply it, in a different way than you expected, by using a new tool which is a non traditional method you asked for but the task still got completed. They still loosely completed the task 30 times ahead of schedule by using their imagination on how to constructively solve your problem, utilizing a tool in their imaginary bag.

I don't think it's wrecking the system as long as the LLMs could be trained and ensure strict accuracy (yes I know they can be inaccurate but again so is any tool in its infancy), the system fails people everyday as a whole. I think it's changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It's changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on "AI" but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.

I think the true point here is fear from breaking traditional values. Humans have never accelerated faster with current technology thats with or without LLM usage.

Ngl. I bought a signal jammer for my wife to use in her classroom (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”) and the kids could never figure out why the signal sucked so bad in her classroom during class times. She never got caught using it and never had to worry about them being on their phones.

If there was an emergency, people would just call the front office and they could always reach her on the land line in the classroom.

I was uninterested in school because nothing was ever done to make me interested, even at home.

Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and now I’m a software developer. Sadly school isn’t for everybody and I just thought I was stupid and lazy, it turns out I was fine I just needed the right help.

Edit: Votes don’t matter but I’d love to know the reasoning for the 5 downvotes on this. Like why don’t you put across your opposition.

I reckon we have reached that state for a long time.

The vast majority of people would have a pretty hard time without food logistics, utilities, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals. The list goes on.

All of which are provided by corporations of some form or another.

Something something about civilization being 5 warm meals away from collapse.

As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We're also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious 'oh that's a problem' than the AI stuff.

This 100%.

The education system was not OK, and has not been for a while. Its main goal is limiting liability, not educating kids.

One of my professors had an AI policy. Using AI for an outline or to find resources was okay, as long as it was cited with the exact prompt used. I think having rules for how to use AI on her assignments actually cut down on use compared to professors who outright banned it.

For anyone who is also not from the US:

A blue book exam is a type of test administered at many post-secondary schools in the United States. Blue book exams typically include one or more essays or short-answer questions. Sometimes the instructor will provide students with a list of possible essay topics prior to the test itself and will then choose one or let the student choose from two or more topics that appear on the test.

EDIT, as an extra to solve the mystery:

Butler University in Indianapolis was the first to introduce exam blue books, which first appeared in the late 1920s.[1] They were given a blue color because Butler's school colors are blue and white; therefore they were named "blue books".

It's in France and I guess everywhere else. Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?

I've also seen a few young engineers using ChatGPT to do their job because it's easier than working. When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I'm not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.

We're doomed.