AI Is Coming to Destroy Education and Thinking or Fsck Efficiency
A new report shows that the use of imitative AI degrades critical thinking skills. Students who used AI to practice with did worse on tests compared to those who studied in more traditional fashion. This should not be surprising, but it is also unlikely to slow down the push to get AI to replace teachers.
Imitative AI is a terrible learning tool. It is not, as some of it hype men would have you believe, a tool in the same class as calculators or photoshop or Excel or spellcheckers. When I use a calculator to do the math for me, I must still understand why I am trying to take the square root of eleventy billion. Excel may run my formulas better than I can, but I still need to understand why I am using said formula. And Lord knows that spellcheckers are much better at spelling than I am, but I still need to know what the word means and why I am using it in that spot in the sentence in order to write effectively. In other words, I still have to think about the thing I am doing in order for the tools to be of any use.
Imitative AI removes that step from you, at least in certain situations. If you rely on it to generate boilerplate code instead of writing something to generate the boilerplate code for you, for example, you lesson your ability to understand why you are doing what you are doing. And that is death in programming, since programming is as much about finding problems with existing code as it is generating new code. If you don’t understand what’s going on, then it is harder to solve the problem your boss insists is about to sink the company and destroy humankind. Similarly, if I have an imitative AI write something for me, I weaken my ability to think, to understand my arguments and what makes them stronger or weaker, and thus my ability to do the same to other people’s arguments.
And none of these examples even touch on the bullshit that imitative AI systems regularly push out. Imitative AI mostly weakens our ability to think.
And it is a terrible teacher. Dan Myer from Mathworlds (who you should be reading regularly) demonstrates why. Essentially, the AI will simply give you the answer at each step if you ask it to. It will start out trying to get you to solve the problem, but at each step, if you say “IDK” to its questions, ChatGPT will happily give you the answer and move onto the next step, where you can do the same thing. You have a solution at the end, but since no teacher forced you to think about why you were doing, you haven’t actually learned much.
Using imitative AI, then, is not just a difference of degree from using tools like spellcheck and calculators, but a difference of kind. It is an entirely new thing, one that does not augment your intelligence but weakens it, causes it to atrophy. The use of these tools is, in the medium and long term, detrimental to your ability to produce anything other than what the tools can already do for you. Critical thinking, creativity — all lost to the demand that companies bail out the bad decision to go all in on imitative AI that our tech overlords have made. And that is why the infection of education by imitative AI is unlikely to stop.
A charter school in Arizona has recently been approved that will do away with teachers. For two hours a day, students will type “IDK” at an AI, and then participate in worshops that provide “financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving”. No, there will not be teachers in those workshops — merely “guides” to provide emotional support. No, seriously. If they have an academic a problem, I guess the guide can commiserate about how it sucks to not have anyone to help them.
The school claims that students learn twice as much in their model, but the justification for that is a wee bit suspect, as anyone who has not had their critical thinking skills neutered by too much time relying on imitative AI could guess. The claim, though, does highlight the justification for forcing students into a sub-optimal learning environment — it is efficient. It may not be efficient in terms of educational outcomes, but it is certainly efficient in terms of not having to pay teachers. And that, after all, is the great promise of imitative AI — it will be so efficient in removing your pesky employees that you can make even more money than you do today! Hurrah! Stock options for everyone in the executive suites!
Except not everything should be efficient. It matters that a child learns, even of learning is not an especially time efficient process. It matters that people know how to solve problems and come up with new plans and solutions, even if it means spending some resources up front to give them the experience and knowledge that such activities require. The economists’ greatest trick on the world was convincing it that efficiency applied everywhere. It doesn’t.
Kids deserve a good education, not an efficient one. They deserve teachers, not just machines that give them bullshit for answers and tell them the correct response if they ask. And we all deserve an environment that allows us to be as creative and intelligent as we possibly can, not one that encourages us to let our brains atrophy. Even if a non-atrophied brain isn’t the most efficient kind.