I decided to respond to @glyph's LLM criticism. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/10/genai-criticism/
@mitsuhiko @glyph while I have an ambivalent opinion on AI overall, the edu angle is something that makes me angry. The only reason why genAI is wrecking havoc in education is because it was completely fucked all along. I only passed physics in high school b/c I ran into a physicist on IRC. Dunno if everyone had private tutors, but I had NO ONE to ask shit while studying except useless tomes at the library. And I doubt hallucinations on high school level topics is worse than teachers fucking up.
> I doubt hallucinations on high school level topics is worse than teachers fucking up.
On an individual levels, sure, maybe, bad teachers do some pretty awful stuff. I'm sorry you had a hard time in physics 50 years ago or whenever it was that we were both were in secondary school. I had a pretty bad chemistry teacher, too. Systemically though? No. Having directly heard concerns coming from actual teachers in classrooms: no, absolutely not.
@hynek @mitsuhiko I mean, you're not wrong that education is, globally, absolutely fucking cooked. If I were to take an accelerationist view, maybe LLMs will cause the entire system to crumble into rubble to the point where it can be rebuilt. But I find that accelerationists are rarely correct about the glorious phoenix rising from the revolutionary fire.
@glyph @mitsuhiko and again: I’m def on the skeptical side of the LLM discussion, but when weighting “rich kids cheat more” vs “poor kids world-wide have more opportunity”, I’m definitely on the “let it shake out” and put it into the plus column.
This is, nearly word for word, the argument that Bitcoin is going to be financial liberation for the global south. That did not happen, neither will this.
It's not a private tutor; it is a private liar. I do not know why you think that the teachers I am talking to are teaching "rich kids" but based on my limited sample size the harms & risks seem higher for kids with lower SES. Have you spoken with a teacher — any teacher — about how this is shaking out in real life?
@hynek @mitsuhiko My prediction is that in the next few years, ChatGPT and the like will just be banned in the "rich kid" schools, just like Instagram et. al. already are in the schools where the parents make Instagram, and "believing random disinfo that ChatGPT is likely to repeat" will be a low-SES marker and another axis for discrimination.
@glyph @hynek @mitsuhiko Don't know about high school, but at university level the current situation is that given it's pretty much impossible (and naïve) to put a ban on use of LLMs, the idea is to teach how to use them critically. Honestly, I'm more concerned on the effects on student coding abilities rather than, say, on writing. Having marked a lot of undergraduate work this year, I don't really think it was much different from anything we had in the past, even pre ChatGPT.
