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Comment on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Trainingparent

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It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output.

For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory capture (at least for K-12 in the USA)

actual discussion in classrooms

Which works in some contexts; I've taken seminars.

Not sure how that works with a multi-hundred person core calculus, physics, or chemistry class.

They did say k-12.

K-12

K-12 means the public school system in USA & canada. It consists of kindergarten, elementary , middle and high schools, encompassing 12 grades/classes, each taking one year to complete.

Maybe it just requires approaching the problem differently. What about the vulcan study pod things? Have the discussion with the AI itself. Have the AI regularly assess understanding.

So this is an alternative that I actually don't object to at all, but you still need to create mechanisms where you then get at the quality of the mental models formed without the assistance of AI. My (very unpopular) hot take is that some of this will actually usher in a new era of "standardized test"-like things; we will be far more permissive about how/in what ways students/professionals acquire knowledge, and the real task will now shift from that to guaranteeing that there is some competency that was reached with the assurance that it isn't masked by an outside influence.

If you basically assume that everyone can and will cheat at all times, then you can let yourself be far more agnostic about it AS LONG as you are confident in some ability to measure the person's skill without the tools.

The interesting thing is that ai actually helps me learn more effectively than ever before. Each session can become a personalized little seminar that dynamically tests me as it presents ideas and concepts and I attempt to apply and extend them.

I think we need to move past recall as the test itself, and tasks as the gate we judge academic achievement by. These were only ever an approximate measure, which is why we still have things like thesis defenses.

But imagine the final being an interview with an agent that is designed to probe your mastery? From my experience so far it seems we could measure much more directly the educational outcome and also accelerate the learning at the same time. But this assumes those involved want to learn, which widespread cheating suggests is not the case. Maybe the real answer is that we shouldn’t attempt to force curiosity but instead cultivate it where we find it, allowing those who reject it to be redirected until they find something engaging.

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