The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat
40 comments
·December 10, 2025robot-wrangler
gorgoiler
Brilliantly said.
In the Good Old Days, part of the role of a good education was to set oneself up to join influential social groups. These groups contained smart, interesting, learned people. They tacitly or overtly selected new members based on how smart, interesting, and learned they were. You can get the grades but remain excluded if your interviewer at Oxford or Harvard thinks you are boring, or the chaps at the Worcesthampton Natural History Club think you’re an uncouth moron, or the managing partner at Wasper & Vanderson LLP doesn’t find you engaging enough. It’s not just these posh elite groups either. Hacker cliques, artists communes, and the like have always focused on cultivating an elite membership on some axis or other through exclusivity that rewarded interestingness.
What is the equivalent nowadays? Are these groups being taken over by fakers who are constantly all pretending to each other, to the extent that the entire ranks fill up with people who can’t spell competence without a computer?
Do they actively reward fakers, seeking out their ilk to the point that the most influential groups are the ones filled with the best self-promotion soloists?
Or perhaps the whole ideal of influential social groups is just going to disappear?
smolder
yeah the real war is between people who do useful stuff and the trillion dollar industry which means to displace them.
dag11
> X didn't.
> Y did.
> And that might be...
It's just so... AI. If the author wanted to make a pro-AI-writing point, maybe they shouldn't have let the AI start their essay with the exact AI grammar we're all exhausted having to read every day.
Avicebron
You know, back in the day, teachers used to try and convey the "why" behind things like writing essays and reading books. Spark notes existed, but a good teacher could convey, hey, there is a reason we are doing this thing, it is because it has value outside the note that says you completed the task itself.
chii
> back in the day...
teachers still do this today. It's just that kids are less disciplined, and more prone to attention deficits. Not to mention that punishment for failure has been dulled down to almost non-existent. "No child left behind" had noble intentions, but the way it was implemented leaves much to be desired.
To me, the fix is to cure the lack of consequences in the outcome of cheating. If you're allowed to cheat in an exam (or not enforced), then obviously it's seen as an encouragement to cheat.
Bring back in-person, closed room, no calculator/phone exams, and these score determines your grade(s), rather than the teachers from the school.
ares623
Back in the day when teachers’ salary can support a family I bet
altcognito
Teachers salaries were never super amazing. Experienced teachers probably could, but it did take a good 10-15 years to get there.
spamizbad
They still do this. The difference is, in my experience, is that parents are totally cool with their kids cheating. I've overheard parents openly mention it at line-up at school.
Hate to say "back in my day" but even as a millennial raised by laid-back parents I'd have been in deep shit if I cheated.
Kim_Bruning
You'd hope AI would be used more to support children and teach them. Can you imagine a patient teacher who's available 24/7? I actually ask LLMs to teach me stuff sometimes, and it does work, but... early days.
banbangtuth
Why not just let it be survival of the fittest? Those who are lazy will continue to be lazy. Those who are determined will continue to be determined. We don't need to help everyone, especially those who don't want to help themselves. If they want to suffer financially in the future because they are being lazy now, oh well, it can't be helped.
saulpw
The lazy and stupid but rich will out-survive the industrious and smart but poor.
vivzkestrel
- the solution is very simple, stop giving homework completely
- when students come to the classroom, before assigning them work, have them place their cellphones at the teacher's table
- then give them homework, as simple as that
gorgoiler
This article doesn’t really jive with me. Homework is more about spaced repetition and the discipline to do it. The notion that it is about writing an insightful essay with a novel interpretation of an already well trodden topic is overly dramatic. Maybe that’s truly what happens at Ivy Academy but most of the children around me are filling in the blanks to conjugate verbs, practicing cursive, or doing some other variation of 10 - catpaw = 7? drill*.
At some point these kids will be faced with a timed pen-and-paper exam. The earlier you can show them what that’s like and how one needs to prepare for it the better.
On the other hand, I taught high school CS that was assessed solely with terminal examination. If you’re managing pupils whose mark comes from papers they write at home I concede the article’s point entirely!
* catpaw = 3
ludston
This article isn't really about AI. It's about how this blogger doesn't value high-school education beyond it serving as a day-care. Talking about AI is for dressing this up as a controversial hot-take for click-bait.
The root of the flaw in this thinking is a common assumption that school is designed to create drones for the workforce rather than to round out human beings. Giving youth an opportunity to be a part of a shared understanding and a shared culture that is rooted in the history of the previous generations.
This kind of essay is on par with a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires. It's not doing us any favours because kids pick up on this disdain and make if part of their own identities.
I'm even more convinced by this when I look at other things this person has asked GPT to write for them. Their core focus is on convincing people not to value traditional education so that they can sell their own competing product.
1970-01-01
I'm looking forward to the day a student accidentally turns in a solution to P vs NP and nobody realizes it for months because nobody is doing work.
cjbgkagh
Maybe that’ll be when AI starts testing us
mikert89
College prestige locks people into life dependent paths, and needs to go away
sgarland
First of all, the entire post reads like it was written by AI.
Secondly, the author / prompter misses the point entirely with this closing paragraph:
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.
You learn fundamentals because they are necessary for you to understand how the magic works, and because that’s how the human brain works.
Is it important for you to be able to write a binary search algorithm perfectly from scratch? Not especially, no. Is it important for you to be able to describe what it’s doing, and why? Yes, very much so, because otherwise you won’t know when to use it.
If your rebuttal to this is “we can feed the problem to AI and let it figure that out,” I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.
CJefferson
I agree, by this argument why teach any child 2+2? This has been performed perfectly by computers for years.
ytoawwhra92
I was allowed to use a scientific calculator in all my high school math exams. My parents were shocked by this because it would've been considered cheating when they were in school.
Homework, exams, essays, assignments and so on are all tools designed to help students achieve learning outcomes. Those tools are becoming less effective due to the technology to which the students now have access.
Making adjustments to the educational tools makes more sense to me than banning the technology.
bilbo0s
>I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.
To be fair, we, all of us, have been living in that world for quite some time now. Not really sure how we'd ever slow down our advance down that road?
tzs
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?
The purpose of an assignment is to give the student problems that can be solved by applying the knowledge and techniques they were taught in class, so that the student can gain experience using that knowledge and those techniques and demonstrate that they have done so to the teacher.
> the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.
Almost every sentence of this piece is a very powerful reminder that we're not really talking about education vs cheating and it's actually about real work vs optics, appearances vs reality, fake news vs information, and all the rest at the same time. A certain amount of bullshit is and always has been standard, and you see it in all kinds of folk wisdom (e.g. "the people capable of being politicians are the least qualified", "those who do not steal steal from themselves", "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"). But in a very short period of time, society itself has shifted away from rewarding real effort or real results almost everywhere.
I agree that game-theory is a pretty good way to understand it, but the conclusions are pretty dark. Defection as the only available strategy and equilibriums that add up to large-scale attractors that we maybe cannot escape.