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Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'
(afr.com)
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by theanonymousone
by theanonymousone
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.
> Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.
Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.
I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.
[1] - https://alpha.school/
Edit: It's 40k a year.
You have to tell it what you want out of the session. A kid could just type in the question and get the answer, but that’s not tutoring.
When I use them for learning I tell it my goal, summarize my current status, and then tell it to teach me incrementally with a quiz after each step. You can get fancy and have it reach back into history to throw in extra refresher questions.
It uses very few tokens compared to a coding session so you can use the highest model for this and the usage is negligible. Using the top model available to you is important to keep things accurate. I wouldn’t have trusted this back in the GPT 4 or Sonnet days, but with Opus, Astra, or Fable it’s great.
For longer sessions set up a directory and have it keep notes about your progress, problem points, and what was covered in the past.
When I first started calculus, I was furious at being taught Newtonian Physics and some bits of chemistry without calculus. It's a stupid bunch of equations you have to learn, which Newton worked out from calculus. I'm glad people are getting it more often together now, but also just a bit jealous at the same time.
Tutoring is a process, and the end result is that the student gains a demonstrable new capability. The how isn't as important as the end result. If we end up with a bunch of people with increased personal capabilities, it's a win. If we're lazy and we end up with a bunch of people leaning on crutches, we failed.
Time will tell, I guess. Could be a surprise answer to Bloom's 2 sigma problem or a very stunted generation, or a mix of both.
It has to be a second step, a critic. If it's the first step you don't end up with any way to know when it's being crazy.
The tutor from Cameroon is much better.
She tells me when I’m getting the basics wrong and designs lessons to go back and fix the basics.
AI loves to tell me how great I am and do lessons at the frontier of what I understand to make me feel good about how much progress I’m making.
:-)
(to make it clear: this was a joke, even though I'd actually be interested whether this works)
I have experimented a bit with AI and have found that AI isn't always great at catering precisely to the syllabus/marking criteria of a specific exam boards even when you give them all the docs publicly available (although I haven't tried frontier models). Somebody who has worked as an examiner for the exam board knows the tricks for how to structure longer answers to both get the marks and to not waste time in the exam. Of course, it may be that I haven't prompted well enough, but if I can't manage to do that, then I probably can't expect my children to!
AI tutors will absolutely be worse, not better, but they may also be only a fraction of the price.
Remind me - why did ChatGPT get rid of study mode?
The people who need tutors are those who are not self motivated. AI doesn’t solve that problem.
It's great at giving you the illusion that you're learning though.
If you know an outline of the material and want to structure it your own way (ex, explain attention to me using Haskell notation) it's really great. But otherwise, human notes win.
learning is not a passive activity. likewise an llm can be used in a passive or active fashion.
Because what is required to be able to know when an LLM is hallucinating? Expertise.
Meaning: exactly the one thing students don't have. By definition.
Ah, now that makes sense.
It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.
If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
If you just hand off learning the lower level knowledge to AI, once people get to needing higher levels they will get lost.
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For how long, though.
>Mr Buckland also claimed the tutoring industry doesn't 'actually do anything unique' but instead provides comfort to students - something AI can replicate.
Jesus. That's really not a good thing.
It's not every day you see someone so incredibly dismissive of the product they're selling themselves.
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This is a real question though. One I've been asking since the early 00s. Learning means something different than it did in decades previous. Merely remembering easy to look up facts is not the slam dunk it used to be.
Imagine trying to speak without having this base of knowledge. Even if possible, you'd never be able to use the language in a comparable fashion. And I think this generalizes to basically everything in every domain. If you want to get good at chess, you need to study a ridiculously massive amount of tactics/patterns. If you want to get good at basketball, you need to simple practice dribbling and shooting a ball into a hoop for many thousands of hours, and so on.
The whole point of the memorization is to make it feel like it's not memorized. Like when you see these words, or come up with your own - it requires absolutely zero effort. There's nothing magical there. It's the exact same way that a master chess player can easily play a competent game of chess with 1 minute on their clock or while blindfolded.
If, and as, we start doing away with the rote, I'd expect we're going to see worse and worse outcomes. Arguably, this is already happening as Western education is continually 'rethought' while China rockets ahead of everybody with an education system that looks very much like a more centralized version of the US education system of 70 years ago.
Even if AI is very powerful, it is very obvious that someone actually knowledgable in a given domain can leverage AI more usefully than someone without that base of knowledge. And to be actually knowledgeable, as opposed to vaguely familiar with terms, takes significant effort over time. Luckily we have tools like spaced repetition that make that effort easier.
The last thing I'd add is that it's useful to know lots of things in various domains. Much like an LLM, our brains draw connections between disparate things which we know well, in the process of diffuse mode thinking.
It had its place in the 80s when looking up involved at least finding the right book. But that time was already on the way out in the 00s. My impression was more that education likes to ask for facts because they are easy to test for.
What you really want to teach are concepts and broad strokes. Nobody needs to know on which weekday the Soviet Union collapsed, but an understanding of the causes of the collapse is useful. Similarly, you don't need to know the speed of light to more than one digit of precision, but knowing the role of the speed of light as the speed at which information can travel through space is useful
That kind of knowledge also continues being useful in the age of AI. It allows you to see the connections in the world, and know which questions you even have to ask
> This is a real question though.
Is it? Why bother to learn how to add 2 numbers when you can just use a calculator.
> Learning means something different than it did in decades previous.
Not really. This is just the acquisition of a new tool. It can possibly be incorporated into education like how calculators were used in the 00s/90s, but you must know how to do the work without the tool.
For every fact you learn there is a necessary context and numerous exceptions when it's applied in other contexts. If you expect AI to spit all relevant facts at you every time you're clueless, you will have no idea when AI is wrong or lying. You will have to trust everything AI (or its owner) tells you.
AI can really help the outcome part (by just doing it for you), so for better or worse I see that delinkage continuing.
People who bother to actually learn while using AI will have an edge on those shovel slop, but there’s clearly a difference from previous eras.
If 1 guy with $16 billion turns into 16 grandkids with (inflation adjusted) $1 billion endowments each, it sounds to me like the family fortune was preserved extremely well, the family is simply bigger.
I think it will actually be much, much worse.
You can argue the same about humans. Growing up, I definitely did encounter people who charged money for tutoring and never taught anything - they just gave the answers. Wasted money.
As for dealing with kids whose classmates' parents help them a bit too much... I honestly don't have a solution. From my experience growing up, beyond a certain amount of help, you definitely are hampering the kid if you overhelp them. I guess I was just fortunate that none of my peers' parents cared to, so I could still be near the top of the class.
Oh, and our final scores were heavily weighted on in-class tests/exams, so even if some kid's parents did overhelp, they wouldn't do well overall.
Can you give us an example to what his looks like in your context (not necessarily you and your kids)?
> The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results
Laptops, tablets, and AI are just tools. If the folks wielding these tools (or ostensibly teaching others to wield these tools) are not using a tool effectively, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the outcomes are unimpressive.
Simple example — put a hammer in the hands of a skilled builder, and you can get a deck or a house frame. Put the same hammer in my hands, and you will get nothing more than bent nails and sore thumbs.
All that said, just like I feel confident that I could learn how to use a hammer well if I took the time to learn and practice, I think students and teachers can learn to use their tools (laptops, tablets, AI, etc.) well if they take the time to learn and practice (ideally with some good scaffolding).
I struggle with this argument when the subject ("the folks") turns out to be "many people", perhaps even a majority of people. If one teacher is an outlier that uses it badly then sure, the teacher is to blame and be judged. But if a collective is using it badly, then perhaps the capability of the collective should have been evaluated before handing the tool to them.
I don't have an answer - it is bad to withhold a tool from the hands of people who will use it badly. But the overall outcome has to also count.
You won’t get any argument from me that most teachers are poorly trained. Money can largely buy someone out of that trap.
That said, just forbidding a tool that is critical in modern life just because some/many people are bad at using it does not strike me as a particularly constructive solution to the problem.
> I don't have an answer - it is bad to withhold a tool from the hands of people who will use it badly. But the overall outcome has to also count.
My “solution” to this is not a popular one. Lower expectations for public mass education.
Over the last 120 years, we have taken a curriculum that was targeted at elites and forced it onto almost everyone.
High quality education should be available and cheap or free to everyone, but I really don’t think it should be mandatory.
If we stopped compulsory education at 8th grade and replaced most high schools with some sort of other skill development program or work/study program, the expectations and outcomes would probably be better aligned.
Large parts of the tertiary education system would be gutted, but maybe that’s a good thing.
Young adults are less competent and resilient than ever for exactly this reason
I’m embarrassed by some of my early work and simultaneously impressed it managed to work at all! And someone was dumb enough to pay me money to do it?!
Sounds just like most 'senior' devs tbh.
I remember growing up being told similar things about the internet and how you can't trust anything written on it. There was some truth to that, of course, but how many people will say that of search engines, despite them being filled with utter crap?
I use AI extensively now, it also cites the websites and electronic documents it uses. It’s a little frustrating in that it cites the URL but not the exact paragraph or chart cited. For that I have to read the entire article. Sometimes it gets it wrong because the context is incorrect. It’s still a great tool, but without my last generation experience in high school and undergrad research, someone without that experience would blindly follow wherever it takes you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning
In PBL the teacher adopts a constructivist approach - supporting, guiding, and monitoring the learning process as opposed to delivering a defined curriculum via lectures or seminars.
Agentic AI is arguably a better fit for this as it can scale infinitely to monitor student progress, offer timely feedback on design choices, and adjust difficulty dynamically based on how the student interacts with the problem.
Your main contention is one I'd broadly agree with - that use of Agentic AI for tutoring abdicates intellectual agency, allowing the AI to perform the critical synthesis and analysis that the student should be doing themselves for learning to occur.
The solution, however, is clear: guardrail the AI to promote core pedagogical principles rather than replace learner cognition by mandating things like instructional friction and the strategic fading of AI support as students build competence.
As explored in the paper I link below, by balancing proactive scaffolding with necessary and beneficial cognitive challenges, AI can preserve the productive struggle essential to effective learning.
https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04543v1
(A final thought: have a look at the current field of companies who specialise in turning training materials into engaging interactive experiences for the likes of Compliance and Security training. This is a corporate field now being automated and democratised for use by the average student in Academic pursuits in an on-demand fashion. Appropriate AI tutoring is basically the same concept.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
In the world of object-oriented programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle#...
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.
Hire more?
Right now teacher largely execute a curriculum this is predefined and do behavior management in US public schools at least. There is not a whole lot of creativity and a lot of rigid administration.
Given that teacher salaries are one of the biggest expenditures it makes sense to try to gain efficiencies while trying to improve results.
Under the current scheme, the results are headed downhill. More of the same won't solve any problems.
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.
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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By the time they get out of primary school most have had the curiosity that drives motivation beat out of them.
I am not sure where I would have ended up if left to my own devices, e.g. as a kid starting first class I was bad at languages and hated it with a passion, in the last class I had the single best German and English final exams in my school district and language had grown on me.
It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.
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There have been many variations on this idea of "letting kids learn on their own". The basic issue is the one you highlight, which is that it works if the student is very self motivated. Most students aren't. Or rather, they're highly motivated to do other things.
I think if you can get into the chemistry just a bit, then the math behind the chemistry, it can be a vehicle. I mean it's the same with programming. Why write code (boring, yuck) when you could play video games? Then the kids see code makes video games. Suddenly you have all these programs with kids making Minecraft mods or whatever. But finding each child's "bomb" would be hard for a teacher to do, especially with a common curriculum
In the early days they were using off the shelf curriculum software and layering their own steering AI over it.
If you believe, as I do, that half of students only achieve half of their academic potential, then experiments like this are some of the most valuable work we could do in society.
But again, let me know how it goes in 25 years and my children can enroll my grandkids.
However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.
This keeps coming up every time, and it's always pointed out that there is scant evidence supporting this view at a large scale.
Every motivated parent I know who homeschooled his kid didn't deal with these problems.
And plenty of those who went to a traditional school did. They aren't even outliers. I'm sure anyone who went to a regular school can think of kids in their class who exhibited the problems you mentioned.
No doubt, plenty of homeschooled kids do as well. Just as you have a distribution for regular schooled kids, you'll get a distribution for homeschooled kids. Claims that the distributions for the latter are skewed in the "wrong" direction are never presented with evidence.
> To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
I went to a regular school, and none of what you say applied to me. The curriculum/instruction came first, and learned little of the former. I'm sure I'll find classmates who'll say the opposite. This sounds like a classic case of post-hoc attributions.
Home school is best, private school if you can, public school if you must.
The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
> The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
I was a product of an environment like that (magnet school with a lot of unstructured time and good access to resources), and it didn’t take me very long to run into the Binary Authoritarian Figures’ version of “you and what army?”, and they were largely correct.
There are ways to undermine parts of the establishment, sometimes even at scale, but the process is not always obvious or easy to access.
Having been to a school like that, I agree with you. I had to learn those lessons quickly.
I largely opted out of being in the middle of that world, but I am still adjacent to it due to its ubiquitousness.
Most kids are motivated given the right environment. Enjoying learning is natural.
The AI element of what you describe does not appeal to me. The weekly testing and assignment to grades sounds a bit rigid too.
Considering how much one to one human tutoring 40k an year could buy that does not sound like good value.
Maths and English (assuming you are in an anglophone country) are important because you need them for other things. You can make them fun and not involve too much study. Reading for pleasure, maths fro and of games, all sorts of things. You need far fewer hours of studying to learn the same amount so do not aim for school like hours.
Encourage self-discipline and motivation. This really pays off in the long term. Have confidence and feel your way. You need to spend a lot of time with them, not teaching but guiding, encouraging, and knowing where they are. I am also love conversational learning.
Until they need to study for exams avoid a fixed curriculum. Do lots of hands on stuff. We made circuits and soldered things, had lots of hobbies and activities. One of my favourite stories is that a senior electronic engineer worried about whether universities neglected practical skills asked a room full of junior ones when they first held a soldering iron and my daughters answer of at the age of eight startled everyone.
Its a bit easier in the UK because home educated kids can sit the same exams as everyone else at 16 (which is the end of compulsory school here). My kids then went to a sixth form college to do A levels. You need to think about paths to qualifications and university. As they get older courses tutors and exams can get expensive but a lot cheaper than a fee paying school.
If you’re the sort of kid who gets everything right first go then you join the “rocket ship” and spend 2hrs a day with AI then play for the rest of the day. You would do well in any school.
If you don’t get it right quickly then you join the “Pirate Ship” and have to spend all day grinding and obeying AI while your friends play. It seems pretty terrible.
https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/fourth-report...
socioeconomic status (SES) is very often a huge confounder when it comes to anything from health issues, educational outcomes, and many other things. rich kids do better - the SES of the parents of Nobel Prize winners [0], young athletes [1], etc are all indicators of this
[0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/nobel-prize-winners-far-...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14668...
I think the most likely outcome is AI makes American education worse, not because if the technology, but because of the “leaders” building and implementimg it.
It doesn't mandate curriculums, choose technology, anything like that? Only recommendations.
They might have been able to monitor its effects but they wouldn't have been able to direct its use or non-use; that's not what they did.
Essentially it was/is an anti-discrimination organisation, making sure that states gave an education regardless of wealth/race/status.
If you don't understand, here's Trump's secretary of education explaining how it'll make our children excel: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xsRUk0dMJu4
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The sad reality is that many of the most senior professors and lecturers in top universities are their for their research rather than teaching ability, and that the success of the elite institutions is somewhat self-selecting as regards their cachet and filtering done by their admissions process (i.e. Ivy League institutions do not offer athletic scholarships).
Learning new topics or skills is a very good example, I had the same experience as you with Claude when I learned a new language.
I find it very easy to engage in a Socratic dialog with the AI. If I ask it, it will actually quiz me and carry on a tutoring session. And it doesn't mind if I ask dumb questions.
I've walked away from colleagues trying to explain things similarly because if you're not getting it after a few attempts you're going to hit a wall of their ability to explain, their patience, time, etc
I used to be a tutor, and the kids who wanted to get ahead were people who more needed someone to give them hints as they learned. The ones who needed to get the grade were a lot more reticent and needed a lot more attention and prodding.
I don't think AI as it currently exists is a good choice for those folks.
If there’s proper oversight (tutor teaches the student and reviews knowledge while the student uses the AI to study or test themselves) that’s fine.
If it’s just the AI then a student isn’t going to know what they don’t even know to ask.
This can also work with books or adequate material someone is basing their learning on.
Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.
More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.
So usually the claims about replacing tutors like in this article come from a place where they usually give a caveat that maybe for highly motivated and ambitious students, they can figure out how to accelerate their learning with AI. But then that undermines the whole argument of transforming education if it wouldn't work with students who are average or below-average in their academic achievement.
Not really. I learned far more from YouTube in subjects and topics that I was deeply interested in. School or college teachers didn't go that deep.
Whether it's pc or not, there are there are bad teachers. I skipped those classes in college and learned from MIT OCW and random tutorials.
So, YT did replace some teachers for me, and it continues to do so for many people.
All failed and all useful. This time ...
I disagree. If, after you have been tutored, you perform well, but still need tutoring for the next year's exam in that subject, then you haven't been "tutored", you've been given a similar enough copy of the exam questions to train on.
As I keep telling my kids, good results is a side-effect of good habits. If you're half-assing things, it shows up in your results. If you studious and methodical, it also shows up in your results, just in a different direction.
AI is used primarily to half-ass things, do things without checking, getting good vibes by that sycophantic tone.
Get your kids into a rut of good habits, and they'll run in that groove forever, regardless of tutors or AI. Half-ass your way through life, then sure, they'll get fucked over by AI tutors too.
One huge issue IMO is that right now, around the world, most people are not taught at all how to learn for themselves nor how to critically think on their own. And that will indeed result in using it as a crutch and not a good tutoring tool.
I don't think so. In fact, I'll go one further: I don't think we're in disagreement, just that I've been communicating poorly.
Allow me retry: My point is NOT "AI makes tutoring worse". My point is that AI tutoring is irrelevant to sustained academic performance.
1. Academic success is a side-effect of good habits (high correlation, not all the way to `1`).
2. A good tutor will instill the good habits for a specific subject (IME, different subjects require different habits, but all require the student to be diligent and consistent at least)
3. Half-assing things, as a habit, will not materially improve outcomes.
4. Most AI use is for half-assing things.
I did not mean to imply that AI in tutoring cannot be successful, only that AI-use tends to result in half-assing things.
Your anecdote is almost the opposite of half-assing things.
> One huge issue IMO is that right now, around the world, most people are not taught at all how to learn for themselves nor how to critically think on their own.
That's a different problem, I think. As I am learning with my two boys, you don't need to teach critical thinking specifically. Critical thinking naturally arises out of being diligent and thorough.
Humans have LOOONG contexts
- LLMs cannot motivate a person to learn because they aren't people
- Learning requires rewiring your brain; you need to try and read content without explanations of every question you might have. Struggling is required for learning
- LLMs cannot generate structured content on long scales. I have tried this many times. Your average TA can easily write a calculus textbook.
- LLMs are RLHFd to just agree with you. Learning requires disagreement and tutoring requires assuredness
You will never get the chance to sit and talk with your now-elderly tutor, in the future, and tell them how much they helped you, or pay their deeper contribution forward by tutoring someone else.
Your AI tutor also doesn't know a job you should apply for, or a local group you could join for your other hobby they now know a lot about, or… or…
I mean the list of intangibles goes on and on, doesn't it? But here at HN people like to disrupt.
I believe that considering that AI is much cheaper than their service offering, and thus customers of Dymocks Tutoring and Talent 100 often ask them how much more they are actually offering for the much more expensive price has put this company under a lot of price pressure from customers.
So, I bet that Dymocks Tutoring and Talent 100 wants to change their main service offering to target parents from rich families instead who aren't so stingy.
I never sat down to memorise trivia about the Roman calendar, but I know Julius Caesar was assassinated on the 15th, the ides of March, because of repeated exposure while thinking things through.
It seems like old assessment techniques could luck in to testing comprehension, because the people who understood things would also remember them. This devolved into the recall being seen as the goal, instead of as proxy measure of something harder to test.
Any "concept" is composed of interrelated facts, all the way down.
Would you really raise your kids to not know how to add 2 numbers on their own?
I wouldn't even raise my kids to not know how to wash their clothes without a washing machine.
Wouldn't want them to be useless on their own, to be dependent on tools to take care of them.
It's fine to use tools to augment what you're able to do, but it'd be a kind of failure of their elders / of their environment to not teach them how to live on their own, independent, or at least dependent on as few things as possible. Tools aren't necessarily always going to be available in their lives. Having options for their life's necessities is good.
It also helps to know when the job's done well. Just because clothes come out of the washing machine doesn't necessarily mean they're clean.
If we're talking:
> Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
Kind of scary to think of adults that need AI to do their thinking for them, with the adults not knowing how to verify anything and just trust the output.
The fun starts when you ask it more complicated questions like 'i have a device that communicates with microwaves and draws a maximum of 20mA at 12v, is it safe for use near humans?' It will look up microwave safety, ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, workplace exposure limits and eventually come up with 1/4W is already safe and the device likely is not a 100% efficient microwave transmitter.
It's not just math either. Try to be an electrician without memorizing the basic principles of electricity and how they interact. You're going to have a bad time.
By induction we can see how this scales upwards, basically infinitely, to higher and higher levels of thinking.
I mean yes, I have some "facts" in my memory because of repeated exposure. I know 2x2 and 5x5 but the whole table? Not a chance.
> By induction...
Well played.
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?)
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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.
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.
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.
That’s a very uncharitable reading.
I have made my mark in the world by exploiting the Achilles’ heels of “authority figures” (which is usually just some form of a lack of empathy). I have caused a few to fall, I’ve made others reform, and I’m just an annoyance to many others. I have trained others to do the same.
That said, I could get whacked out of existence figuratively or literally if I crossed the wrong person or group.
There are others like me, but (as I mentioned before) we aren’t always easy to find.
I know the above may seem grandiose, but I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about these “authority figures” since I was a kid. I’ve done something about it, but I also didn’t choose to bang my head against a wall and call it progress.
Uncharitable, maybe. But, yeah, you should definitely stand up for yourself more.
1. You may want to work on your reading comprehension skills.
2. You would probably benefit from being more curious and less certain.
One question: how did you find tutors and were they meeting physically or also online? And what subjects did you find needing tutoring?
Home schooling sounds good in paper, but as much as school can suck, it is also an irreplaceable opportunity to learn to socialize, which is a much more valluable skill than knowing pre-university curriculum.
My schooling was alright but I can imagine a much better version given different circumstances.
(although, to be fair, it was a different time. AI would have surely made it much better)
So that's about 0.75%.
The rest were either competent, good or amazing.
(Then again, one of the remainder was internationally famous for being a (self-acknowledged) media whore and while I know he added value it wasn't always to the subject at hand)
School is now distant enough for me that I have reached the brain fog age where I cannot be commenting on internet things intermittently while writing documents…
I'm not a huge fan of prompt engineering or elaborate skills that are longer than a couple sentences. But you have to give the AI context. The more context the better
If a random person comes up and asks you a malformed question how do you answer? What's worse if what if the question is not actually malformed in some contexts and because you're a wizard that has massive amount of contextual information there are plenty of right answers for the 'wrong' question you just asked.
In schools classrooms tend to avoid unlimited exploration as it would take unlimited time. On your AI prompt the next thing you ask could be anything, anything at all. Just exactly how is the AI supposed to know if you're an idiot?
-the thing that motivates you doesn't have to be the same thing that teaches you (e.g. a book can be a useful learning tool even if it isn't human)
-you can absolutely choose to interact with an LLM in ways that generate productive struggle. If you naively ask it for answers it won't be much use in this regard. But that's just a poor choice of how to use the tool. Just like hitting yourself on the head with a book doesn't mean the problem is with the book as learning tool.
-You don't need structured content 'on long scales' to learn. You learn a little bit at a time. Long textbooks are a side effect of the economics of moving paper around. Not a prerequisite for learning. An LLM will happily mimic the table of contents of a textbook or an outline for course. And you can use future prompts to generate the bits you need as you need them. One-shoting a textbook is a silly use of the tool. Plus, we're not short on textbooks. We're short on ways students can get customized help: answers to the specific ill-posed questions they have in their heads. LLM's are quite good at this. You can have textbooks AND LLM's (and professors)
-LLM's are happy to disagree with you. Just ask them to and they oblige. Ask them to respond as if they were a tutor and they will mimic the assuredness if appropriate.
- Students (Humans) aren't going to struggle on average. They're always going to take the path of least resistance. I know of some successful algebraic geometers who did indeed hit their head on heartshorne in grad school.
- a) Structured content generated on long scales is way more effective because you can tie together many details. It would be weird to learn from chapters, each unrelated to each other in style and content.
- b) We're actually not short on students getting help. Office hours were abound at my university. I actually found that customized help was detrimental; if a TA answered every question a student had, the student wouldn't put the effort into trying to learn the material. Imo you want to see students struggle. I've seen students go from F to A- by just forcing them to struggle on the content.
- Not really. I discuss complicated math and programming with models regularly and when I say something like "actually you're wrong" they say "yes, you're right". If I ask them to be confident, they will not change their wrong answers. Humans have a much better conception of self and opinions than LLMs
If you're giving it prompts like that, you've shot yourself in the foot.
Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you DO need to use a calculator to quickly tell me what 8 * 6 is. But I would be highly surprised if you got a degree in math and still needed a calculator for that.
I of course know how to figure it out. Let's see my instinct might be to do 8x2 first because I do know most of the 2s. Then 16x3 I can do in a few steps of addition. 20+12+16 then 48
And yes then I checked on my calculator because I'm posting this online and don't want to look like an idiot.
Making yourself feel better about giving up does not constitute actually doing anything.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (he was not joking by the way)
Of course, if computers DO threaten to take over literally everything, then people are even more scared and react aggressively, as demonstrated in this 1939 article describing IBM's vocoders:
"The Pedro Peril" (the first AI that actually talked back was nicknamed Pedro, and described as "the latest and most fearful gadget from IBM", the journalist's conclusion was to suggest Pedro be deported as he would spread propaganda and maybe even become a dictator) (unsigned Washington Post editorial, 1939)
Here's Pedro in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0