Quotations tagged ai, education
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By making effort an optional factor in higher education rather than the whole point of it, LLMs risk producing a generation of students who have simply never experienced the feeling of focused intellectual work. Students who have never faced writer's block are also students who have never experienced the blissful flow state that comes when you break through writer's block. Students who have never searched fruitlessly in a library for hours are also students who, in a fundamental and distressing way, simply don't know what a library is even for.
— Benjamin Breen, AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder
My constant struggle is how to convince them that getting an education in the humanities is not about regurgitating ideas/knowledge that already exist. It’s about generating new knowledge, striving for creative insights, and having thoughts that haven’t been had before. I don’t want you to learn facts. I want you to think. To notice. To question. To reconsider. To challenge. Students don’t yet get that ChatGPT only rearranges preexisting ideas, whether they are accurate or not.
And even if the information was guaranteed to be accurate, they’re not learning anything by plugging a prompt in and turning in the resulting paper. They’ve bypassed the entire process of learning.
Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. [...] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.
— Neal Stephenson, Remarks on AI from NZ
I've often been building single-use apps with Claude Artifacts when I'm helping my children learn. For example here's one on visualizing fractions. [...] What's more surprising is that it is far easier to create an app on-demand than searching for an app in the app store that will do what I'm looking for. Searching for kids' learning apps is typically a nails-on-chalkboard painful experience because 95% of them are addictive garbage. And even if I find something usable, it can't match the fact that I can tell Claude what I want.
I used to have this singular focus on students writing code that they submit, and then I run test cases on the code to determine what their grade is. This is such a narrow view of what it means to be a software engineer, and I just felt that with generative AI, I’ve managed to overcome that restrictive view.
It’s an opportunity for me to assess their learning process of the whole software development [life cycle]—not just code. And I feel like my courses have opened up more and they’re much broader than they used to be. I can make students work on larger and more advanced projects.
In the long term, I suspect that LLMs will have a significant positive impact on higher education. Specifically, I believe they will elevate the importance of the humanities. [...] LLMs are deeply, inherently textual. And they are reliant on text in a way that is directly linked to the skills and methods that we emphasize in university humanities classes.