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Students have always had the curriculum and standard study material, it was always possible to study alone, but the teacher mostly provides an interactive gap-bridging layer, and the classroom setting provides some level of obligation, I could be wrong but I don't know why AI can't fulfill the interaction layer part.

by piltdownman8 hours ago|

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Sunk-cost, social pressure and obligation are probably the most salient points for educational success in a classroom setting with a teacher of median-skill versus an AI trained on the same corpus.

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).

by dofm6 hours ago|

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This is such a terrible implied indictment of the schools you attended that I feel sad for you.

by dumberquestions5 hours ago|

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Some teachers do genuinely make a difference, and maybe that's good enough, but unfortunately there are many more who struggled to add value to the original material, and I don't really think this is a unique experience.

by dofm4 hours ago|

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Of all the teachers I have ever had, at school and university, I can think of only three who struggled to add value to the original material. One was in the middle of a nervous breakdown (of a kind that genuinely would not have been out of place in the John Hughes movies of the day, but that contributed to him passing the following summer); the other two were in the middle of significant crises of different forms.

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)

by dofm1 hours ago|

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2.5% I meant to write there. And I know this because I just found that 2.5% elsewhere that I meant to write 0.75%.

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…

by Aurornis8 hours ago|

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I’ve found LLMs to be very good at teaching. Better than I expected.

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.

by spwa43 hours ago|

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You can make shells around the AI experience that make sure this happens, and you'll have to provide some form of oversight.

by jgbuddy9 hours ago|

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disagree- i used it for the last few years of coursework preparing for exams. If you give it context (i'm studying for an exam, do not give hints unless asked, your objective is to help my understanding) it is incredibly helpful. This isn't advice, it's a company going out of business.

by fma27 minutes ago|

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That's great but you're not an 8 year old.

by LollipopYakuza9 hours ago|

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I have recently realised that people actually don't know how to prompt. They use AI "raw" and don't understand how the question can have a drastic impact on the result, let alone using skills or system prompts.

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.

by nkrisc8 hours ago|

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Which isn’t surprising at all if you turn off your adblocker and look at how these AI chat products are marketed to the general public. They’re presented as all-knowing oracles that can deliver exactly what you want with only the vaguest and briefest of prompts.

by philipwhiuk8 hours ago|

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Maybe some argue it's ASI but for me AGI requires that the AI understand what you're trying to ask rather than require you to carefully engineer a prompt.

by wongarsu1 hours ago|

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If you're starting a fresh session the AI has no context at all beyond your prompt (and the generic system prompt). It isn't psychic, it can't know if you want a straight answer, an elaborate explanation or an interactive teaching lesson. You have to actually say what you want

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

by pixl978 hours ago|

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"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"

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?

by spwa42 hours ago|

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Continuing the great tradition of claiming that any machine, and especially any AI, unless it takes over literally everything, is worthless. Or in the words of Pablo Picasso:

"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

by zffr8 hours ago|

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It really depends on how you are using AI. If you simply use it to get the answers to homework you won't really learn. If you use it to figure out the topics you need to learn, and to identify/close gaps in your understanding then it is a very useful tool for learning.

by wat100009 hours ago|

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Depends heavily on the tutee. If it’s someone highly motivated looking for some guidance like you, I could see it working really well. If it’s a kid who would rather be scrolling through Instagram and needs an authority figure to keep them on track, it’s not going to work.

by graemep2 hours ago|

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If the kid would rather be scrolling instagram then solve the underlying problem. They will not have a good life if they will only do anything constructive when forced to by an authority figure.

by xhkkffbf9 hours ago|

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I agree with you and not the OP.

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.

by micromacrofoot8 hours ago|

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yes, similar experience... you can ask the same question in 10 different ways until you understand it and AI doesn't care

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

by 111010100100019 hours ago|

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As a teacher, this is obvious. But when you ask a student 'do you want to learn?' they don't actually understand the question.

by jrflo9 hours ago|

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I don't know if I agree, if I ask a physics question it will show me the process to get to the answer, and it's really nice to have something to talk to with infinite patience to dig down into steps you don't understand. I learned a ton about implementing machine learning from using AI models. Obviously that takes a level of curiosity and effort on the learners part, but with a pretty minimal system prompt I think you'd get a pretty great tutoring system.

by tptacek9 hours ago|

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They rule for maths. I had an extremely good experience going from high school trig through multivariable calc with them over a year. Best math teacher I ever had.

by ian-g8 hours ago|

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I think the difference is between someone like you who wants to learn and a teenager who has to learn.

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.

by ofjcihen8 hours ago|

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It comes down to the same issue that all AI comes down to really.

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.

by fnordpiglet8 hours ago|

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My daughter worked on learning for various classes by building her own plugin and skills for tutoring that uses various techniques of teaching without revealing answers, giving advice on homework questions without disclosure, etc. She overlaid with the personality of her stern gymnastics coach. It was surprisingly effective and I was pretty impressed at 11 she had the sense to not go straight to the answers. I think the “oh the kids” hand wringing is always overblown with kids - it’s the adults that don’t adapt well.

by tomjen38 hours ago|

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The ChatGPT web app, though apparently not the desktop app, does have a study mode where it will not give you the answer but will help you reason through the problem like the world's most knowledgeable, most attentive teacher.