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. mapcars · 1790295465 · focus · HN ↗
  >Students need to understand what AI is and is not.
  Do we really understand what AI is and is not? For example we all know AI can hallucinate, but how does that knowledge help us in practice? If I'm leaning something new I would have to fact check everything which would take about as much time as learning from verified sources.
  1. sandworm101 · 1790296557 · focus · HN ↗
    I just watched a youtube about cruise ships. A near-riot broke out during a movie quote quiz because the AI that made the questions confused Casablanca and Gone With The Wind. If it aint ready for quiz night, it aint ready to teach kids.
    1attice · 1790297870 · focus · HN ↗
    With all due respect, this example is obsolete anecdata. I doubt the cruise ship was using Astra, for example, or Fable. Or really anything past GPT 3
    breezybottom · 1790299651 · focus · HN ↗
    Almost no one is, so I don't get your point.
    sethammons · 1790299901 · focus · HN ↗
    Ask each of those if they can spell seventeen, and then ask them how many e's are in the word.
    wild_egg · 1790318873 · focus · HN ↗
    Ask a color blind person to spell "red" and "green", then ask them how many red apples are on the table.
    LLMs work on tokens. They literally cannot see individual letters. Yet, unlike humans, they can instantly create a tool to solve this task for them and never be stumped by it again.
    I'm so tired of this brain-dead gotcha comment.
    sethammons · 1790336889 · focus · HN ↗
    It is important to understand how this technology works. It isn't magic. Your example is solid. Similar to the Chinese Room.
    Do you think your legislators or most users understand tokens and predictions and what is going on? Do you think that those who bombed a school using it know this?
    Until frontier models can account for the disparity between what they can do and what the person (or other agent) is asking, we will continue to suffer bad information used like good information.
    That tokens cannot count letters like that is not a brain-dead gotcha. Ignoring how humans are using these models is lacking in critical understanding of the real world. People are literally going to die due to humans not understanding how this works (and already have). True brain-dead, and body-dead.
    mitxela · 1790335686 · focus · HN ↗
    They're now over fitted on strawberry has 3 R's. So ask them how many R's are in srrarbrarry. There are, obviously, 3 R's in srrarbrarry too.
    Sohcahtoa82 · 1790363542 · focus · HN ↗
    This is something I've found a lot of.
    People formed their opinions on LLMs in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT was first released and taking the world by storm and then never updated them after nearly 4 years of improvements.
    Hell, just being able to search the Internet did MASSIVE things for reducing hallucinations.

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