I recently got into a debate with a friend who swears is “Against AI Slop”, but uses AI for 90% of his researching stuff. When i point it out, i got a 20 minute rant about how AI helps him learn and makes him learn faster, but i see massive issues with this. For once, using AI even as a starting point is a gamble, if not a straight damage to the learning process as a whole, mainly because sloppified information spit out by an LLM is often simplified, imprecise and oversimplified. For example, he told me to be interested in Arch Linux, but said the Arch Wiki was too “difficult to understand and took knowledge for granted” and told me that AI helped him understanding it. However i think that the wiki being verbose and designed to not be understandable by everybody is a filter to make sure that you don’t go and use Arch if you can’t understand the wiki, not for gatekeeping, but because a sloppified and short version of processes explained in the wiki will result in you knowing WHAT to do, but often not HOW and WHY. Also, it keeps you locked to AI since if you get used to the simplification (and often misinformation) given by the slop generator, it’ll be hard to understand the real sources, and it’ll be hard to learn the jargon and will lead to an incomplete result. I could go on for days and feel free to debate me, but I am tired of pretending that AI is a great learning tool. It can be, but in its current status it’s just not, and when it can be, IMO the other cons that come with AI usage outweigh the possible value of the info.
You and I both want people to learn. You and I both see AI as an obstacle to learning. We just see things slightly differently.
I actually think this is not the main reason AI is awful for learning. The gravest problem, in my opinion, is the illusion of competence or the illusion of learning that it brings. This phenomenon is very well documented in the learning literature, well before LLMs were a thing. But LLMs amplify it.
Just take a look at PISA results. Students do poorly because they use LLMs and they never properly understood the content.
However, the education literature also paints a clear picture: after someone learns the basics, they’re ready for other kinds of activities. In fact, if someone already understood thing and yet they still go over the same thing over and over, they stop learning. This is called the expertise reversal effect. So the alternative is to move on to other stuff.
I’m not arguing for having AI in the classroom. I’m just thinking of the implications of a well-researched theory: cognitive load theory. From that point of view, students that already learned the basics can then look at LLM slop and see its deficiencies. They can now plan an activity with an LLM and see how it nails some stuff and falls apart in other stuff. In that case, and only in that case, LLMs can improve learning in the same way that looking at your friend’s essays can improve yours.
But, again, I’m not arguing for AI in the classroom. I think the world would be better off with a blanket AI ban in education. I think this is similar to how nicotine actually has some positive effects, but the bad outweighs the good by so much that it’s much better to ban it.
Maybe.
I guess here I ask: what’s the goal? What do we want more of? What do we want less of?
If our only policy is “out wiki should be incomprehensible to most*”, I’m not sure we’ll have more people in the world who understand the wiki. If, instead, we think “our wiki should be as accessible as possible”, then we may find ways of teaching people.
i never said that, maybe i worded it poorly. What I’m saying is that simplifying a wiki article is detrimental to learning because it paints a wrong image. If i get a slop answer to a question about a wiki article I’m effectively avoiding the learning process that’d lead to me being more capable to maintain my system more effectively, not to mention that it teaches me to seek answers instead of taking the quick, risky and immoral shortcut. Sure, i guess AI can make it easier to understand, but these hobbyist pieces of software are meant to be used carefully by people who are willing to spend time to use them. If you don’t want to read the wiki, It’s okay, use something else, but using AI will eventually lead to issues.
As for the rest of what you said (my bad if i misunderstood), i think that if the only useful use of AI in education comes AFTER learning the basics, it is essentially just useless, since if you manage to know the basics you are clearly able to go further