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  3. /Students fight back over course taught by AI
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  3. /Students fight back over course taught by AI
Nov 20, 2025 at 8:24 AM EST

Students fight back over course taught by AI

level87
123 points
137 comments

Mood

controversial

Sentiment

mixed

Category

news

Key topics

Artificial Intelligence

Education

University Protests

Discussion Activity

Active discussion

First comment

8m

Peak period

19

Day 1

Avg / period

19

Comment distribution19 data points
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Based on 19 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    Nov 20, 2025 at 8:24 AM EST

    3d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    Nov 20, 2025 at 8:32 AM EST

    8m after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    19 comments in Day 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    Nov 20, 2025 at 9:42 AM EST

    3d ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (137 comments)
Showing 19 comments of 137
jjgreen
3d ago
1 reply
Prophetic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991581
morkalork
3d ago
"why can't college kids do math?"
danishSuri1994
3d ago
1 reply
AI can help with content generation or scaffolding, but teaching is still a bidirectional feedback process. When the model can’t adapt to misunderstanding or context, students immediately feel the gap. It’s a UX failure more than a “should AI be allowed” issue
gdulli
3d ago
We don't talk enough about AI as a vehicle for what's essentially austerity.
zulban
3d ago
3 replies
It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there.

Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.

Bad lectures delivered by rushed or apathetic professors is such a death march. Learning theatre.

tekne
3d ago
1 reply
When I started undergrad, my father told me that university was not for learning; that was what the Internet was for, and since I was in tech; it wasn't quite for proving myself either: that was internships and portfolio. It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.
exitb
3d ago
Given that the discussed lecture was delivered remotely, I don't think is offers much of a social experience too...
Aurornis
3d ago
> It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos.

This is too extreme of a generalization. There are obviously bad professors and universities that are not worth your money, but most professors at any halfway decent university are going to put a good deal of effort into teaching well. Getting a job as a professor is surprisingly competitive for the relatively low compensation because there are a lot of people who want to teach and teach well.

You can find some decent learning material on YouTube but it’s still mostly geared toward infotainment. I have a lot of bookmarks for excellent YouTube videos that I share with juniors on certain topics, but on average it’s really hard to find YouTube teaching resources that teach at the level of a university professor. When you do, it’s hard to get people to actually watch them as true teaching often involves slogging through some of the less exciting content as well. Most YouTube videos are designed to trigger “aha!” moments but only provide a surface level understanding. The type of learning where you think you understand a topic but couldn’t really explain it to someone else well or solve problems on a test because you haven’t gone through the full learning yet.

> Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.

You’re missing the biggest one of all: Accountability. We already saw with the MOOC trend that releasing high quality university lectures online from top universities is not enough to get many people to go through with learning the material. Getting them into a place where they know there will be a test and a grade and they have some skin in the game makes a huge difference.

Some people learned from MOOCs, but in general the attrition rate and falloff was insanely high from lecture 1 to the end.

whstl
3d ago
I worked in the tech side of education until 15 years ago or so, and it was already clear how problematic it was getting.

Distance learning was basically a dimly-lit grainy video recorded 5 years prior being shown to hundreds of classes all over the country. Instead of teachers, "tutors" (we couldn't call them teachers) making barely above minimum wage answering questions of dozens of classes and grading things on Moodle/Blackboard. A real teacher would be responsible for a class but they would barely see anything, as they were just figureheads already busy with real classes.

I also remember some courses having almost half of the courses being long distance, so even people choosing traditional education were pushed into doing cost-saving computer shit.

The computers in the campus were obviously miserable to use, so I did everything in my power to at least make the software light enough so that people wouldn't suffer much, but in the end I hated myself for being in that industry.

marstall
3d ago
3 replies
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc.

I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.

locallost
3d ago
I've had this experience as well, but I also noticed I am much less blown away when the information is put to the test.

So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.

nancyminusone
3d ago
There's no problem with that.

It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?

eertami
3d ago
I somewhat suspect you would not find it so amazing if you paid £9000/year for it, though.
latexr
3d ago
http://archive.today/ipTpO
DerC4ptain
3d ago
Slides were generated via gamma obviously
morkalork
3d ago
Tangent: There's a short story I vaguely remember from when I was young about a kid being raised in a bunker after a nuclear war and the big twist was that all his friends he went to school with (virtually on the TV screen) were just AIs to keep him company. I could never find it again though, even when interrogating google or chatgpt I couldn't find it. Anyone else know of this story?
pessimizer
3d ago
Well the truth has finally been openly accepted by the universities themselves. They sell fancy pieces of paper with your name on them in nice calligraphy, not knowledge.

I can't imagine having so little respect for my own reputation that as a professor I'd throw out unreviewed AI slop as my own intellectual work, but I bet nobody is getting fired for it so that's just a sign of my own stupidity. A professor with no pride, working for a university with no pride, giving students with no pride certifications that they can use to get ahead in an economy with no pride.

I'm bullish on AI in education, because of the possibility of creating an individual student model that the machine can use to constantly target weaknesses in understanding. But that hasn't been invented yet. What you would get now is a teacher that hallucinates, simply lies to bridge gaps, forgets what it was supposed to be talking about, and constantly fabricates references.

cranberryturkey
3d ago
Checkout summaryforge
zkmon
3d ago
Outrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces.

Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.

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ID: 45992304Type: storyLast synced: 11/22/2025, 6:20:39 AM

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