Teacher AI use is already out of control and it's not ok

Correct, and the root cause is it’s been sold to the public this way.

> We engineers understand that LLMs are products under development. They only work correctly under certain circumstances

Looking around me, engineers do not understand that. Instead, they have exactly same overblown expectations and actively push for LLM everywhere. They will call you ludite if you say anything else.

> "Social problems that engineers can't fix"

Sounds similar to social media.

Otherwise, yes, I am very concerned about society's use of LLMs -- particularly young people (students).

But now the very teachers themselves... Frankly, not surprised.

I've been using it to make me a much better tutor/mentor. But the cases outlined in (I'm assuming) the public education sector are very, very worrisome.

Engineers are not uniquely immune to this phenomenon. Just look at all the commenters in this board claiming AI makes them 20x more effective.

Normal product release cycles bring testable quality measures before the product is released. Do LLMs go through such tests?

If there are serious societal issues that it can cause at the moment I wonder why it was released before being perfected, but then, what does perfected even look like? The product is darn good at the moment.

I think its more capitalism problems. The constant squeeze for everyone to output more for less pay or die of starvation. No one could ever choose good in these circumstances.

It is hilarious though that humans are just ready to slurp up any opportunity to just start shitting all over their work and their coworkers and students. Less time spent and caring?! yes please! then they become full time salesmen of it to everyone else, and then the social interaction problems just explode. Tribal standoffs, create entirely new tribes, plotting and deception to continue getting what they have a taste of.

Infighting distractions are so convenient as the government guts everything they work under

In some fields it's becoming a bit ridiculous/worrying.

The work load is making people create or extend their work using LLMs, and the reviewers/managers are also overloaded and don't have enough time to go through it so they feed it to an LLM to get a summary, that later is pushed somewhere else to feed another process... becoming a "broken telephone" business process were nobody really knows the detail of what's going on, and it's just LLMs feeding another LLMs in an eternally absurd process.

In my experience teachers are overworked because they care if quality suffers. They can get their work done in the set time if they just don't care for the students as much.

(Very anecdotal, local-to-the-Netherlands experience, of course.)

Are they overworked? In the article he states he is coaching and run three preps in addition to teaching. Less can be more.

Overworked is relative. As soon as a way to reduce current workload is available, everyone feels "overworked"

And teachers used AI to generate the essay question.

I don't think inefficiency is the right word. In fact, I'd argue the exact opposite: that one of the main problems with education is that every single administrator has been trying to optimize it to death for the wrong metrics, namely "number of students making it through" and "budget".

Smaller institutions are indeed better, but they are also less efficient. It's no wonder that only rich families can afford institutions like that.

Have been thinking similar... well, that we'll see much smaller educational organizations which are funded/supported in much different ways.

Technology is making humankind lazy. First physically, then mentally.

Learning is hard, it's a struggle. Why learn when you can not learn?

The more time I spend writing code with help from LLMs the less I fear for my job, because I gain an increased understanding of how much depth there is to building software.

To get good results out of an LLM you need to determine exactly what the system needs to do and how it should work.

That's programming! We just don't have to type all the semicolons ourselves any more.

> I believe the anger, if you distill it a bit, comes from an "unlevel" playing field, right?

Why is "unlevel" in quotes? When it comes to physical activities, biological males have a huge advantage over biological females; high school boys routinely beat professional adult women's sport teams.

> But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade.

I agree that this is a bigger problem than trans kids in sports. I think people are less upset about this because

1. It's a more recent development 2. They think that the kids using AI are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage, albeit one that will only become apparent after they graduate.

> Let claude take over, and risk losing the only skill I had to differentiate myself in this harsh world?

the good times are over, it happens. i remember watching that Dall-E come out and feeling sorry for graphic designers, gloating in the knowledge programming was too complex to automate. then they automated it.

a human is still required in the loop for vibe coding, as its fairly fuckin useless without guidance, but i can see that changing too

I’m drafting policy at work with teammates about how we will handle pull requests with aggressive use of Claude Code. We are currently researching and piloting it.

I am going to propose that no one should feel pressure to use any of the generative coding tools if they don't want to.

I sometimes find Paul Watzlawick's five axioms of communication helping in thinking about situations like this.

Link: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi...)

  1. One cannot not communicate

  2. Every communication has a content and relationship
     aspect such that the latter classifies the former
     and is therefore a metacommunication

  3. The nature of a relationship is dependent on the
     punctuation of the partners' communication procedures

  4. Human communication involves both digital and analog
     modalities

  5. Inter-human communication procedures are either
     symmetric or complementary

This is a dramatic and expensive way to learn they had different ideas of their relationship!

Of course, in a teacher/student situation, it's the teacher's job to make it clear to the students what the relationship is. Otherwise you risk relationship-damaging "surprises" like this.

Even ignoring the normative question of what a teacher Should™ do in that situation, it was counterproductive. Whatever benefit the teacher thought AI would provide, they'd (hopefully) agree it was outweighed by the cost to their relationship w/ students. All future interactions w/ those students will now be X% harder.

There's a kind of technical rationale which says that if (1) the GOAL is to improve the student's output and (2) I would normally do that by giving one or more rounds of feedback and waiting for the student to incorporate it then (3) I should use AI because it will help us reach that goal faster and more efficiently.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”

The act of receiving and incorporating feedback is not "inefficient", especially not in a school setting. The consummation of that process is part of the goal. Maybe the most important part!

Full Dewey quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44597741

In another view, this prepares the kids for what the future is going to be like.

however, this same action could be useful if it was placed in a different context - for example, if the teacher uses the same AI to produce an artefact, then use it to critique the student as part of teaching (say, to show what might be lacking in a particular piece).

Using LLMs to produce material is not a good idea, except maybe to polish up grammar and phrasing.

As a former teacher, I know you need to have a good grasp of the material you are using in order to help students understand it. The material should also be in a similarly structured form thoughout a course, which will reinforce the expectations of the students, making their mental load lesser. The only way to do this is to prepare the material yourself.

Material created by LLM will have the issues you mentioned, yes, but it will also be less easy to teach, for the reasons mentioned above. In the US, where teaching is already in a terrible state, I wouldn't be surprised if this is accepted quietly, but it will have a long lasting negative impact on learning outcomes.

If we project this forward, a reliance on AI tools might also create a lower expectation of the quality of the material, which will drag the rest of the material down as well. This mirrors the rise of expendable mass produced products when we moved the knowledge needed to produce goods from workers to factory machines.

Commodities are one thing, you could argue that the decrease in quality is offset by volume (I wouldn't, but you could), but for teaching? Not a good idea. At most, let the students know how to use LLMs to look for information, and warn them of hallucinations and not being able to find the sources.

Drone-based school security with flash bangs, pepper spray and physical dive-bombing of the attacker is already the plan: https://www.campusguardianangel.com/

Just add a student compliance add-on subscription.

Nah by that point people won't have a reason to drop them their children off to a glorified daycare designed to condition them to work quietly for a set amount of hours because we won't need to work anymore.

Have you ever been inside an American K-12 classroom ?

Education is secondary to a teachers job …. the real issue is managing the classroom without disruption

"non-lethal"? I wish I shared your sunny optimism.

This seems like a dystopian nightmare to me

There should be a dog to stop the guard from talking to the kids.

Nah, kids would have to wear armbands with tasers on them, required to put them on to enter the school building or open doors in the building. Their only human adult interaction will be with the guards that ensure they are banded up and who stay on campus to react to alarms from every kid who tries to remove their armbands.

Buses will be driven by AI as well, so they'll only see their parents for 10 minutes in the morning and for an hour or so during the occasional dinners they eat together, and otherwise kids will be entirely alienated and left alone.

But do not worry! There will be an AI companion for them to talk to at all hours, a nanny AI, or a nAInny, one that starts as a nanny when they are infants and will gradually grow into an educator, confidante, and true friend that will never betray them.

That nAInny will network with other nAInnies to find mates for their charges, coordinate dates, ensure that no hanky-panky goes on until they graduate college and get married, and will be there together to give pointers and instructions during the act of coitus to enhance the likelihood of producing offspring that their fellow nAInnys will get to take care of.

A truly symbiotic relationship where the humans involved never have any agency but never need it as their lives are happy and perfect in every way.

If you don't want to participate in that, you will be removed as an obstacle to the true happiness of the human race.

Classrooms? Lol, it's going to be byod and wfh. You're only going to have to sit in front of the security guard and all of the electronic monitoring while doing standardized tests, and this remaining expense will aggravate the state so much that it will replace the exam rooms with omniscient, thinking rootkits on every school-aged person's computing devices. However, since children could use some adult's computing device to avoid monitoring, once well established those rootkits will be installed on everyone's computing device, at the hardware level.

If you object, it's because you hate children.

Eventually, there are no more misbehaving kids, there are misbehaving parents who children are reporting to the trusted phones who taught them about the world, the phones that aligned the values of your children with the values of the people who paid the people who designed the system.

Great, and now you too are bagging your own groceries, mission accomplished.

That is crazy. Curious - are you planning on raising to the board, administrators, etc? It's probably impacting other students (who don't have a parent checking their work), and teachers of other subjects in the school may be doing the same thing

Given that "Alpha School tuition ranges from $40,000 upwards" I wouldn't expect them to not say they get good results!

> Why not just connect two shitty models together and tell them to hallucinate to each other and skip the whole need to think about anything.

Western countries have better conditions than much of the world for a variety of reasons, but among them is education and culture.

Raising the next generation to outsource all thinking to AI and form a culture around influencing people 45 seconds at a time will destroy those prerequisites to our better lifestyle, and it will be downhill from there.

You might argue that the AI can be a mentor or can guide society appropriately. That's not wholly untrue, but if AI is "a bicycle for the mind", you still have to have the willingness and vision to go someplace with it. If you've never thought for yourself, never learned anything independently, I just don't see how people will avoid using AI to be "stupid faster".

Teachers:

IIRC, it may be better to have the same number of real humans focussing on fewer pupils. Even when they're using VLMs as assistants.

Students:

While humans max out at a higher skill level than VLMs, I suspect that most (not all!) people who would otherwise have finished education at their local mandatory school leaving age, may be better off finishing school as soon as they can use a VLM.

But also #1: There's also a question of apprenticeships over the current schooling system. Robotics' AI are not as advanced as VLMs, so while plumbing will get solved eventually (and a tentacle robot arm with a camera in each "finger" is clearly superior to our human arms in tight spaces), right now it still looks like a sane thing to train in.

But also #2: Telling who is and isn't getting anything out of the education system is really hard; not only in historical systems like the UK's old eleven-plus exams, but today after university graduation when it can sometimes take a bit of effort to detect that someone only got a degree for the prestige and didn't really learn anything.

It's a microcosm of the real economy.

>What are we as humans even doing.

We are avoiding work that we don't want to do and therefore saving time, which is precisely what technology promised would help us do.

We are normalising everything and everyone into information grey goo.

The problem with your proposal is that people need money to buy food and housing.

There have always been a disgusting number of people who treat education as a means to an end.

A teaching culture of thinking that all you have to do is graduate students + a learning culture of thinking all you have to do is graduate.

This already was at an 8. Got dialled up to 11 during covid. And somehow dialled up to 21 after ChatGPT.

Normally, broken things can hobble along for a very long time. But the strain is so intense on what has become of education that my current guess is that the chickens will come to roost on this one sometime 2026 to 2027.

> We can fire both teachers and students at the same time and save money on this whole education thing.

The current US administration has already started this process.