Thread

Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

142 points · 233 comments · theanonymousone

radiorental · 1790264419 · focus · HN ↗
This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.
Students need to understand what AI is and is not.
Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.
While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.
The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.
Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
1. sandeepkd · 1790288587 · focus · HN ↗
  AI has its own benefits but its really a bad idea to use it in education as a primary source. LLMs have lots of information, reasoning ability, however they have their own limitations and by the nature these limitations just amplify.
  Few days ago my son was working on a problem which asked if square is a rectangle. Turns out his class teacher and external tutor (who was using AI) had different opinions on it. My wife consulted AI as well and she also came to the conclusion that square is not a rectangle cause AI told her so, AI told the same answer to external tutor. I understand that the context matters and if one probes AI more with additional context it may come up with correct answer, but this depends on the assumption that the person asking AI for something already knows the answer.
  1. maest · 1790288765 · focus · HN ↗
    In what world is a square not a rectangle?
    I don't understand how your wife interrogated the AI to be told a square is not a rectangle.
    And how can two tutors disagree on this?
    jacobgkau · 1790289368 · focus · HN ↗
    I read their comment as the teacher (who was correct) and a tutor (who used AI) disagreed, not two tutors.
    With the amount of blatantly false information I've seen LLMs spew out in response to my very simple questions, I can very easily imagine one would get this basic information wrong somehow, although I did just Google it (as Gemini, and particularly the on-search-result-page version of it, seem to be the absolute worst of the common models in my experience), and it did get the answer right.
    cesarb · 1790298053 · focus · HN ↗
    > In what world is a square not a rectangle?
    In the world of object-oriented programming: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle#Violation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle#...
    [deleted] · 1790326937 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    lern_too_spel · 1790334813 · focus · HN ↗
    Real squares and rectangles are immutable. You might as well make a rectangle mutable and turn it into a pentagon.
  2. OutOfHere · 1790289232 · focus · HN ↗
    Let me say this in a different way: If some rectangles can also be squares, then this shows that a square is a rectangle. This is not a logical deduction; it is an intuitive one.
  3. opt_dot_step · 1790289758 · focus · HN ↗
    I am very curious what either person asked that led them to say that AI had told them a square is not a rectangle.
    The obvious question of “is a square a rectangle?” is definitely NOT causing any LLM to say “no”.
    Hallucinations are an issue but they genuinely are no longer a concern for any modern non-tiny LLM for basic facts that you would expect a K-6 course to cover. Maybe you might be able to find a few random hallucinations in knowledge covered at the high school level but I’m quite skeptical even that still happens. Yes, they can still, at times, hallucinate sources but I cannot recall the last time I actually saw this happen. I think it was at least a year ago
    epihelix · 1790308556 · focus · HN ↗
    I just tried with Luna, Gemma4, GPT-OSS-120B. All got this correct. (Unsurprisingly.)
    I'd guess that the tutor had a brain-fart, and then blamed AI for their own silliness? No matter what the reason, they clearly shouldn't be tutoring.
    (I mean, seriously, what on earth?)
  4. hahajk · 1790290320 · focus · HN ↗
    This is not a problem with AI, this is a problem with a human accepting an answer without understanding why it is correct. The tutor could also read a book that states "A square is not a rectangle" (or vice versa) and repeating it back to the student as established fact.
    blub · 1790329875 · focus · HN ↗
    The whole point of having teachers is to give intellectually developing and still vulnerable children the best possible support they could have from a human which is ideally interested in their well-being, being responsible and in doing a good job.
    Replacing that with AI is the kind of SV-stupid which starts making sense after the educational system was hollowed out for profit reasons and is failing. The human in that system is just checking in and DGAF.
  5. hyperpape · 1790290787 · focus · HN ↗
    What kind of AI is this? ChatGPT says a square is a rectangle. Google search says it.
    fn-mote · 1790300288 · focus · HN ↗
    Most charitably, it was not a story of recent AI usage, but a few years ago when such a mistake would be more believable.
  6. bigstrat2003 · 1790298630 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs have lots of information, but they have zero reasoning ability. That is why they are so bad at giving answers: they can't reason from one thing to another, but instead everything is a statistically likely result. If using an LLM for learning, you have to make sure to check everything it says or you will take in false info, guaranteed.
    judge2020 · 1790299580 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs have had a reasoning setting for a while now. The reasoning is what allows them to go through and test each output to see which output/answer ends up aligning with known context the best (whether that be constraints that steer it away from some outputs, or information/hints that steer it towards the desired output).
    The problem with the tutor's question is that they're going to AI to answer this question and not asking underlying questions like "what makes a square a square" and "what makes a rectangle a rectangle", then doing their own thinking to determine if a square's qualifications also fit inside the qualifications to be a rectangle.
    Heck, even if you just feed the underlying into AI it'll reason the answer in a logical manner:
    > In standard geometry, A square is a quadrilateral with 4 equal sides and 4 right angles (90° each). A rectangle is a quadrilateral with 4 right angles. Its opposite sides are equal and parallel, but all four sides do not have to be equal. So the key distinction is: Rectangle: four right angles. Square: four right angles plus four equal sides. > > That means every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square.
    Asking LLMs to just give you answers is the real antipattern. But if you remember that the only thing it's good at is finding patterns given context/constraints, it can be an extremely good tool.
    Also, I have a feeling the vast majority of the populus is using free versions of Claude or ChatGPT. Thankfully recently ChatGPT Free is GPT-5.6 Luna, but before the response qualities and capabilities of the free chat output were less than stellar.
  7. aoki · 1790350665 · focus · HN ↗
    When shape names are first introduced, many kids will flip out if you suggest a given polygon can be multiple things at once. So they define the shapes (square, rectangle, rhombus, parallelogram, trapezoid, etc.) so they are mutually exclusive, with categories like quadrilateral as residual categories. You can tell who is doing AoPS/Beast Academy because they argue based on the standard definitions, whereas the teacher will insist on the curricular definition or on the “most specific answer.”
    Another classic is “how many roots does a parabola with real coefficients have?” The answer is always two by the FTA, but the textbook Algebra 1 answer is zero, one, or two because they haven’t covered complex numbers yet.

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