MudMan comments on What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

There's a difference between knowing things and memorizing them, though.

I agree on the broad notion that using reference is perfectly fine at all levels of academia. You memorize information by putting it to use. Repetitive reading with no application intended just for memorization is a massive waste of time.

That is fundamentally different to attending lectures, reading books or paper and definitely not the same as putting in the work of writing your own or doing your own research.

My concern with this idea is the same as my concern with every other attempt at a "disruptive" AI product: you can already do all the valuable parts of this with existing tools and the novel things this can do aren't particularly useful or something that chatbots do well.

By all means use AI tools to do schoolworks if and when they're useful. It's just that this doesn't sound like it is.

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[–] MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 7 points 8 months ago (1 child)

Though I think your first point is mostly semantics, I do it's ok if some things are expected to be memorized. What do you mean by:

Repetitive reading with no application intended just for memorization is a massive waste of time.

Is the class and test not the intended application? I bet most people who learn about DNA or Golgi bodies never apply that information outside of school. Most people who took an art history class had to learn about cubism and likely haven't uttered the word since. What about the difference between igneous and sedimentary rock? I think these classes are important, but you cannot expect people to have the time to build up an understanding of all of these subjects from first principles. At a certain point you have to memorize something. Even if you went to a volcano and watched the magma cool yourself, you'd still have to remember what the result is called. If a student can define a term and identify it in action when they see it, I don't think they need to have done any original research on it, and most coursework (lectures/videos/homework) gives them the tools to be able to define and identify it. It's about exposure and exploration, and for that kind of surface level understanding I think the coursework for most classes counts as sufficient "putting in the work".

What does useful mean in this context:

By all means use AI tools to do schoolworks if and when they're useful

My point is that they are not useful because they don't help you learn the material. What is the "valuable part of this"? It literally just does the work for them. AI repeatedly makes factual errors, so I wouldn't even trust it to rephrase something, much less teach it to me, especially when there are a lot of trustworthy educational tools and sites out there.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 point 8 months ago

If the class and test is the entire intended application then what's the point? I mean, at least throw personal growth in there or something. If going to the gym made you fat and unhealthy we wouldn't go around telling people to exercise.

Look, my point is that you learn about things when you use that knowledge repeatedly. It's a chicken and egg situation and you do have to start from memorization (you wouldn't expect a medical doctor to look up the names of body parts until they just naturally stick, and you WILL have to learn some vocabulary from scratch to learn a language), but by and large if something is written down and you have access to it that's probably enough to learn it over time.

There's a bit of a sense that study has to be pain and work because... well, old people like to see young people suffer like they used to suffer, whatever. But man, I can tell you I learned far more from the teachers and professors that gave us something to do and the tools to do it than from the ones that showed up with a power point deck and asked us to memorize bullet points.

As for what AI is useful for... I mean, yeah, it's not a lot. That was my point. AI is decent at reminding you of things you sorta vaguely know but can't recall, does ok at summarization and at some coding tasks. Some of that is useful in school (I certainly would have spun up a OCR system instead of giving myself carpal tunnel cleaning up notes), but it's not much use for you if your job is to go to a lecture and... you know, learn from it.

I will say that they are not terrible teaching aids, though. Stuff like explaining language stuff, or answering specific, precise questions that you can otherwise verify are not terrible uses. And, as a very much amateur coder, AI haters may have to accept that I've actually gotten better at coding by myself via using a chatbot to fix my problems (if only because the chatbot sucks at doing the thing from scratch, so I still do the parts I can do). You can use reference and technology to learn stuff on your own, it doesn't matter if it's a chatbot or Wikipedia. It won't do you much good to try to have it replace you at doing the work if the point of the work is to teach you how to do it, though.

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