The AI-Education Death Spiral A.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

You know, back in the day, teachers used to try and convey the "why" behind things like writing essays and reading books. Spark notes existed, but a good teacher could convey, hey, there is a reason we are doing this thing, it is because it has value outside the note that says you completed the task itself.

From the article:

> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student? And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.

While this might be more true of "factoid based classes" (such as geography) - it completely misses the point of subjects where students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself. (writing, music, foreign languages, etc.)

First of all, the entire post reads like it was written by AI.

Secondly, the author / prompter misses the point entirely with this closing paragraph:

> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.

You learn fundamentals because they are necessary for you to understand how the magic works, and because that’s how the human brain works.

Is it important for you to be able to write a binary search algorithm perfectly from scratch? Not especially, no. Is it important for you to be able to describe what it’s doing, and why? Yes, very much so, because otherwise you won’t know when to use it.

If your rebuttal to this is “we can feed the problem to AI and let it figure that out,” I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.

> To be clear, I’m not advocating for AI in real learning. AI is only useful right now as a stress test as it reveals how hollow adolescent work has become. If it pushes schools toward offering work with relevance, impact, and agency and away from hopeless busywork (“When will I ever use this?”), that is a win.

But how will they ever know that if they don’t go through the process? I am not saying the current way of teaching is perfect but you can’t tell what is and isn’t bullshit without some experience at some point.

We had a mandatory home economics class that taught how to balance a check book, cook, do laundry, and even how taxes worked. Yet people still thought that class was bullshit and a waste of time. Many classes such as health, gym, shop, a/v, typing, all had people blowing it off as useless stuff they will never need to know. ChatGPT turning every class into that is a nightmare future for the youth of the world. People will grow up entirely unable to think.

> If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?

By that logic now that text to speech has gotten quite good we should stop teaching kids to read.

I'm looking forward to the day a student accidentally turns in a solution to P vs NP and nobody realizes it for months because nobody is doing work.

Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.

You can cheat on tests, shoplift in stores, and pretty much nothing will happen to you.

When teachers can’t give failing grades to students or kick them out of their class for blatantly breaking the rules, this is what happens.

Meanwhile I took a language exam in Japan last weekend where a bunch of people got kicked out of the room - instant fail - for using their phone during the break when it was expressly disallowed (we had to put it in a sealed envelope that we couldn’t open until the exam was over, break included). Given reports I’ve heard, I suspect at least a single digit percent of test takers failed the test this session simply for breaking this rule.

From the test takers who got kicked out of the room and tried to negotiate (unsuccessfully) with the proctors, it was instantly obvious who came from cultures where the consequences of rules are carried out and who didn’t.

Big swing and a miss by the author here.

The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.

Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.

> the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.

Almost every sentence of this piece is a very powerful reminder that we're not really talking about education vs cheating and it's actually about real work vs optics, appearances vs reality, fake news vs information, and all the rest at the same time. A certain amount of bullshit is and always has been standard, and you see it in all kinds of folk wisdom (e.g. "the people capable of being politicians are the least qualified", "those who do not steal steal from themselves", "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"). But in a very short period of time, society itself has shifted away from rewarding real effort or real results almost everywhere.

I agree that game-theory is a pretty good way to understand it, but the conclusions are pretty dark. Defection as the only available strategy and equilibriums that add up to large-scale attractors that we maybe cannot escape.

> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?

The purpose of an assignment is to give the student problems that can be solved by applying the knowledge and techniques they were taught in class, so that the student can gain experience using that knowledge and those techniques and demonstrate that they have done so to the teacher.

- the solution is very simple, stop giving homework completely

- when students come to the classroom, before assigning them work, have them place their cellphones at the teacher's table

- then give them homework, as simple as that

This article isn't really about AI. It's about how this blogger doesn't value high-school education beyond it serving as a day-care. Talking about AI is for dressing this up as a controversial hot-take for click-bait.

The root of the flaw in this thinking is a common assumption that school is designed to create drones for the workforce rather than to round out human beings. Giving youth an opportunity to be a part of a shared understanding and a shared culture that is rooted in the history of the previous generations.

This kind of essay is on par with a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires. It's not doing us any favours because kids pick up on this disdain and make if part of their own identities.

I'm even more convinced by this when I look at other things this person has asked GPT to write for them. Their core focus is on convincing people not to value traditional education so that they can sell their own competing product.

Why not just let it be survival of the fittest? Those who are lazy will continue to be lazy. Those who are determined will continue to be determined. We don't need to help everyone, especially those who don't want to help themselves.

My entire (non American) education career was exam based. The exams were tightly supervised, no books etc. Every thing had to be memorised. Cheating was impossible.

Funny thing is, memorising something is a big help to understanding it.

In that system, AI is a very useful tool. AFAIK, this is how they still do it in many Asian countries.

It worked pretty well. Produced a lot of educated people.

There seems to be a tacit premise here, that anything an LLM can do is meaningless as an exercise for a student, but that is simply not true, and if it were, it would likely be the case that we would soon run out of pedagogically-‘meaningful’ tasks.

[delayed]

It is not a spiral. The connection from "Engagement drops even further" to "AI gets better, harder to detect" doesn't make sense. It's not related.

I agree that AI drags down the education, but it doesn't have to be (and it is not) a spiral. To be credible and prevent false slop smell, please use proper narrative frameworks.

The chart at the top of the article slips in a key premise with one word: ‘meaningless’. If what they are doing is meaningless, then having AI do it is no sort of solution: the solution is to find meaningful work, and my teachers were mostly capable of doing that.

Meaningful work, however, tends to be difficult (or at least an interference in one’s social life), so there will inherently be a motivation for having it done for you, and if that becomes acceptable, why even end kids to school in the first place?

> They’re copying essays from AI, running them through “humanizing” tools, and handing in work they’ve barely read. They’re having AI listen to lectures so they don’t have to. They’re sneaking AI via their mobile phones into tests.

The essay thing is real, but I am not mad at AI summarizing lectures. And someone having access to a phone will cheat with Google if not AI.

And many teachers I know do written in-person tests now. They aren’t as obsessed with perfect sentence construction, and say they value students individual quirks more (they seem more pleasing against the backdrop of AI slop).

So yes there are challenges but teachers adapt.

children now don't have to work hard, but they're precious because no one is having children in the educated world.

This is nonsense. School work is important. It isn't just teaching kids things, it's making them _practice thinking_.

I hate the classic question that often comes up in regard to math education, "When will I ever use this??"

The answer is simply that it makes them practice thinking. Human knowledge is transferable across domains. And practicing concentration and persistence is critical. Without these things, people can have all of the information in the world at their fingertips, but be completely unable to make reasoned decisions or build upon the foundation that mankind has been building up diligently for millennia.

Don't let the kids cheat. Make them do their homework after hours in the library. Or the auditorium. Or the gym. Anywhere. Homework is supposed to be a couple of hours of "on your own" study after all, isn't it?

> “The work must be something the child feels is worth doing.” Schools forgot and flipped that.

That’s a nice premise, but it seems the author imply the school has to come up with some idealized activity that would magically kids teach kid reading, writing or doing maths problems without really doing it, because it’s supposedly boring.

But in reality at one point kids have to acquire the love for these, that they are worth doing and rewarding for the sake of it.

So my (maybe unpopular) opinion is that the author is part of the problem. Because the root cause is that it’s parents, not school and teachers, that forgot it’s their role to nurture their kids into this. I’m not blaming parents for the multiple complex reasons they aren’t doing it, but it’s time we stop putting everything on teachers.

College prestige locks people into life dependent paths, and needs to go away

Not sure about kids these days but as an adult I find the LLMs very good for education - you can ask pretty much anything and get a good answer, often with links to youtube lectures.

Re stopping cheating, just give them proper exams like we've had since time immemorial.

You'd hope AI would be used more to support children and teach them. Can you imagine a patient teacher who's available 24/7? I actually ask LLMs to teach me stuff sometimes, and it does work, but... early days.

"If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?"

This is Idiocracy in the making.

This is just another aspect of the failure to foster a positive society. The rich who are balls deep in AI don't give a fuck about what happens at a societal level. They want numbers to go up and the result is dumb people in charge of things they shouldn't be in charge of.

Learning skills are hard. Learning to add numbers requires drills. Learning to read big books is hard. There's no getting around that except that some students are intrinsically motivated, but all of them need to learn to read, write, and calculate and hopefully do so with meaningful and accurate information.

>AI is a filter.

>It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving.

This is rich coming from an article written by AI instructed to SEO it to the moon.

I would like to point out two fundamental misconceptions towards the end of the article:

1. "AI is a filter. It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving."

At any reasonable school-college level this is false. LLMs are perfectly fine replacing creative and collaborative aspects of work or study at intermediate levels. Yeah, they are unrealiable in results, but the participants don't care. LLMs produce data in shape of creative and collaborative work and that is enough to submit it.

What I mean by this, is when the house of cards will burn down (and it won't, because education is not a purpose of a school), it will also burn down creative training too.

2. Solving real/actual/applied/etc problem at the education facility of any level is nice and all (running business or solving community problems), but some studies just don't afford to be that "real" or "applied". All humanities, most of the harder STEM, etc. In USSR we had a whole separate class of higher-ed facilities, below universities called "technicums", which focused only on the applied knowledge. They were fine, but they definitely didn't fill all the demand.

> X didn't.

> Y did.

> And that might be...

It's just so... AI. If the author wanted to make a pro-AI-writing point, maybe they shouldn't have let the AI start their essay with the exact AI grammar we're all exhausted having to read every day.

This writing an essay / writing a paper obsession doesn't make any sense to me. All American kids are always "writing a paper" on something. I never wrote a paper on anything of significance. If this constant writing of papers had a great effect, you'd expect me to perform at the 50th percentile or lower of people. But my income has always been much higher than that, I'd say I write more blog posts than the 50th percentile (the quality of which might suffer from the lack of paper-writing, one might claim), and I'd rate my life at much higher than the 50th percentile.

My parents took a different tack, and insisted that I spend my time reading, playing, or doing something. I spent very little time on homework because my parents negotiated this with the school. My school scored us entirely on exams, which I performed well on - just as I did well on the GRE to come here.

By the pedagogical standards of America, this must mean that I was atrociously educated. Why then am I happy and successful here? I suspect it is because paper-writing is a waste of time. I suspect that almost all education comes from exercises, revision, and proofs.

This, along with the religion of note-taking[0], has made me suspect that US pedagogy is not particularly well-informed. The higher-education system is obviously superlative, but the teaching of children seems pretty haphazardly determined.

0: I've always hated note-taking. I'm glad to have found at least some others on HN like me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640454

I think there must be a different angle to win this game.

If you play fairly, the skills and knowledge you learned are truly yours. But if you are outsourcing all your proficiencies to an AI, than what will become of you?

Kids want to be cool unique snowflakes, if one can master a skill without the resorting to cheating, one will gain the ability to impress the peers.

Push in that direction.