https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...
This is such a disingenuous take on the article, there's nothing naive or simplistic about it, it's literally full of critical thought linking to more critical thought of other academic observers to what's happening at the educational level. The context in your reply implies you read at most the first 10% of the article.
The article flagged numerous issues with LLM application in the educational setting including
1) critical thinking skills, brain connectivity and memory recall are falling as usage rises, students are turning into operators and are not getting the cognitive development they would thru self-learning 2) Employment pressures have turned universities into credentialing institutions vs learning institutions, LLMs have accelerated these pressures significantly 3) Cognitive development is being sacrificed with long term implications on students 4) School admins are pushing LLM programs without consultation, as experiments instead of in partnership with faculty. Private industry style disruption.
The article does not oppose LLM as learning assistant, it does oppose it as the central tool to cognitive development, which is the opposite of what it accomplishes. The author argues universities should be primarily for cognitive development.
> Successful students will grow and flourish with these developments, and institutions of higher learning ought to as well.
Might as well work at OpenAI marketing with bold statements like that.
The core premise is cognitive development of students is being impaired with long term implications for society without any care or thought by university admins and corporate operators.
It's disturbing when people comment on things they don't bother reading, literally aligning with the point the article is arguing.
That doesn't feel right. I thought that several groups were against the popularization of writing through the times. Wasn't Socrates against writing because it would degrade your memory? Wasn't the church against the printing press because it allowed people to read in silence?
Sorry for the off-topic.
Technology is neutral it’s always been neutral it will be neutral I quote Bertrand Russell on this almost every day:
“As long as war exists all new technology will be utilized for war”
You can abstract this away from “war” into anything that’s undesirable in society.
What people are dealing with now is the newest transformational technology that they can watch how utilizing it inside the current structural and economic regime of the world accelerates the already embedded destructive nature of structure and economic system we built.
I’m simply waiting for people to finally realize that, instead of blaming it on “AI” just like they’ve always blamed it on social media, TV, radio, electricity etc…
it’s like literally the oldest trope with respect to technology and humanity some people will always blame the technology when in fact it’s not…it’s the society that’s a problem
Society needs to look inward at how it victimizes itself through structural corrosion, not look for some outside person who is victimizing them
Again I think this is a pretty narrow theory that Hershock gets some good mileage out of for what he's looking at but isn't a great fit for understanding this issue. The extremely naive "tools are technologies we have already accepted the changes from" has about as much explanatory power here. But also again I'm not a philosopher or a big Hershock proponent so maybe I've misread him.
The purpose of higher education should be to learn things that will be useful to you (most likely in a career). However, the current purpose is to gain a piece of paper which will mean your job application doesn't get immediately thrown out.
People being willing to spend so much time and money on university only to deliberately avoid learning or thinking by using AI to cheat on everything suggests that the system itself is broken.
These students don't actually want to be in university but feel they have to in order to have a chance at success in the current job market. We are in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone is getting degrees just to be a more appealling applicant than the next person. You might have authored a very impressive opensource library but still not get the junior software dev job because HR never gave your CV to the hiring manager since you don't have a STEM degree and 50 other applicants did.
However, I don't really know how university's will evolve from this or what this new system will be. It seems hard to motivate a bunch of 18 year olds to actually want to learn stuff without dangling a piece of paper and exams at the end. Maybe that's just a symptom of all of the levels of education that come before university also dangling paper and exams. There were certainly parts of my degree I would have, at the time, liked to have skipped with AI but now (older and wiser) I'm very glad I couldn't.
Education is not just "buying" a certification to open doors. This part I'm happy to get rid off.
But those students aren't going to be using AI to skip all the learning. The article and just about everyone in higher education right now are saying that a large number of students are doing that. So, there must be a large number of students who are primarily motivated by piece of paper (and the job opportunity it provides).
That doesn't mean that they must be completely disinterested in their subject. They might have some lectures they really like and where they do the coursework properly. However, the epidemic of AI cheating speaks to the inefficiency created by the need for the piece of paper. If someone is essentially skipping 80% of the learning with AI then the job market requiring you to have a piece of paper is causing someone to waste 80% of their time and money. They would be better served by a short course teaching them only that 20% of skills they actually want.
The social side of things isn't something I was really addressing in this context. To me, that's a bonus of university. Given the cost, it doesn't seem worth going to university primarily for a social experience (unless you live somewhere where it's free). I also really hope that AI isn't affecting these social aspects.
here is a UK .gov study of 21 schools, colleges, academies, universites and technical colleges who have adopted ai.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-in-schools-and...
The majority of education providers have yet to adopt AI. Further research with those yet to adopt AI, and/or who are not considering using it, would help us understand better the barriers to more widespread use of AI across different types and phases of education.
For example, the assistant headteacher of one school said the top categories their teachers used in their AI tool were ‘help me write’, ‘slideshow’, ‘model a text’, ‘adapt a text’, ‘lesson plan’ and ‘resource generation’.
> As the AI champion told us: “If you put junk in, you’ll get junk out.”
and if you put gold in, you'll still get junk out