Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs: Inside an AI-Powered Private School
33 points
1 hour ago
| 5 comments
| 404media.co
| HN
gruez
1 hour ago
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Besides the coverage from fox news/new york times that the article mentions, there's also a much more extensive review from a parent who had his kids in alpha school: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
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vondur
3 minutes ago
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So not really AI, but a well run private school with high achieving students. Looks like they do optimize the learning strategies.
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recursive
18 minutes ago
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The scrollbar is completely absent in Firefox. I think this is the first time I've seen long-form content with zero visual indication where I currently am in the document. Crazy.

Edit: Actually the scroll-bar is there, but it's nearly impossible to see because of the low contrast with the background. I guess I can blame my user agent for this one.

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trinsic2
44 minutes ago
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Holy crap that is a long article. In my view, the only important point is time freed up which should be a part of normal education. If students had more free time to think and contemplate one wonders what kind of world we would live in.

Too bad it takes a dubious idea for an AI school to surface that wisdom.

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ashton314
45 minutes ago
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> “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.

I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.

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glitchc
23 minutes ago
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Maybe the school system failed him.
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MengerSponge
2 minutes ago
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These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.

"My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access."

Prison. People need to go to prison for this.

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rglany
14 minutes ago
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So they are trained to follow instructions from a computer, trained to be unable to function without a computer. Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.

Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.

A new cadre school for Technocracy Inc.

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gruez
2 minutes ago
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Holy crap, quite bit of extrapolations in your comment.

>trained to be unable to function without a computer.

Where is this from? The article mentions a lot of issues with alpha school, but the implication that kids are glued to screens and are "unable to function without a computer" isn't one of them. There's the issue that finishing random ed-tech games don't prepare you for the real world, but I don't really see how that's different than the perennial complaint that the US education fails to prepare kids for the real world (eg. "I learned from school that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell but not how to do my taxes")

>Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.

???

>Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.

See the review linked in my other comment. It might not be an unbiased account, but I'm reasonably confident that the average student there gets more exposure to "humanities or arts" and other extracurriculars, than the average public school student, who maybe gets a field trip to the science center once a year.

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bethekidyouwant
8 minutes ago
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The dream is clearly asking a student what they’re interested in, getting them to self direct on a project with guidance and deliver something you can evaluate. I would hazard that AI helps rather than hinders this.
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