Personally in my own work it's pretty obvious how it's an amplifier. You waste far less time trying to find an answer to something that confuses you.
You might say "it's good to learn research skills" and that's true to an extent, but tutors have always made people better students. And AI is a tutor you can message at any time, day or night, for free.
"AI is a tutor you can message at any time, day or night, for free"
which makes it not a tutor. if it is true that tutors have always made people better students, then those tutors are definitely imposing some limits on how many answers they give you and requiring you to do some thinking. I think you could have premised your same argument by, "copying a smart kid's answers has always made people better students...."
That's why you see the split in outcomes. The fraction of kids who value self improvement are going to get smarter, and the ones who just want to slide by will fall behind.
Nothing stopping kids from asking AI to give you responses like this, it is more than capable. There is always going to be the temptation to take short cuts though.
Yes, but is it the correct answer?
I wasted several days trying to have AI teach me containers. I would have been much better off just reading the docs.
Did you initially ask the tool to read the docs?
I wouldn’t be surprised if you did and still had the same issue, but if you relied on the training data recall alone, you definitely shortchanged yourself.
I’ve had decent results with tasking a model to run pre-research and summarization as a checklist, then have a second instance of the model(s) review and then develop my learning plan learn, versus the times I just asked Claude or ChatGPT to explain something to me “from memory.”
The knowledge AI has is vast. Communicating it to you is slow and narrow baud. The chat interface itself as a medium is lacking and will need to be replaced without another medium.
Finding an answer isn't always an objective, though. I agree it often has been too much in baseline schooling.
First, there's a certain amount of baseline knowledge we'd like students to possess. Without a certain prerequisite amount of underlying information committed to memory, it gets far more difficult to achieve fluency in a topic.
But more than that, there's other skills we're trying to build: frustration tolerance, processing contradictory information, disciplined problem solving. You only really develop these skills through productive struggle. If you find a way to shortcut the productive struggle, students truggle.
> but tutors have always made people better students.
Sure. Bloom showed us that students taught with a combination of tutorial and mastery methods, one-on-one, outperform students in a normal classroom by roughly 2 sigma.
The paradox has always been-- why hasn't technology unlocked these gains for students in normal classrooms? If we could boost everyone's performance by this amount, it would be huge for society-- but society can't afford to teach everyone with tutorial methods.
Since the 1970s, we've invested in edtech towards trying to make this happen, but most of it has actually had net-negative effects as best as we can measure. AI, so far, looks to be much worse.
I think part of the answer is that a big part of what makes a conventional classroom work are social pressures. So far, it looks like AI (and edtech in general) does more to dismantle conventional pedagogy and to break down the social fabric of the classroom, than it has improved differentiation or unlocked this tutorial effect more broadly.
> If you find a way to shortcut the productive struggle, students truggle.
I was assuming this was a typo and was thinking about making a joke about it, but it does appear to be slang that fits the context:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Truggle
> 1. the standard of perpetual intellectual failure made by an individual.
> Truggle; the standard defenintion of a person who is a failureat everything.
the difference in the vast majority of cases is that people go to a tutor with an intentional stance of cultivating a particular kind of practice, not merely to get an answer to a question. It's not technically impossible to do this with a chatbot but far less likely given that, unlike an even half decent tutor, a chatbot will never cultivate that attitude in you. The elimination of that friction is exactly why people talk to bots.
The good thing about a tutor is that he or she isn't always available and knows they won't be in the future, so they instill good habits and independence in you.
> a chatbot will never cultivate that attitude in you
Hence the whole "AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good" argument made earlier. The ones who do this because they want to understand, don't need to cultivate this at all, it naturally happens with chatbots. They don't just ask for the answer to a question, but then dig into why it's like that and what not. But the ones that don't care, now have to do even less to get the fast answer without understanding.
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