Nixeris t1_j1ulds8 wrote on December 27, 2022 at 2:53 PM

Reply to comment by Gagarin1961 in AI and education by lenhoi

> quality communication as an adult is the goal, then the adults who are use AI will be able to do it faster and better than ones that don’t.

No they won't. That's just teaching them how to get a computer to do the thinking for them, not challenging them to do the thinking themselves.

Let's make this clear.

Writing an essay is not about entertaining the teacher or making the best essay. The essay is a test not the purpose of the lesson. The test is to see if you, in your own words, can formulate arguments and correctly identify concepts from a lesson.

Writing a prompt for ChatGPT may produce a better written essay, but it's completely sidestepping formulating your own thoughts and putting them in your own words. If you do that, you aren't learning or practicing your mental skills, you're just learning how to write a better paper.

The skills you learn by you writing a paper yourself go beyond the ability to write a paper. Creating a prompt and just letting an AI write for you is only teaching you how to write prompts.

Gagarin1961 t1_j1unots wrote on December 27, 2022 at 3:11 PM

I’m not so sure it will, when people use calculators, they still need to know the meaning of the output for it to be useful.

Either way, the end result will be that the people that use AI will be better at communication, persuasion, and influence.

tanzerdragoon t1_j1utmrn wrote on December 27, 2022 at 3:53 PM

I don't entirely agree with this point. If one uses AI to think for you, then it's actually the AI thinking and not you. Using the AI, you actually have to be good at those skills already. We had a web dev at work who used an AI writer to make copyright for an email blast and what he submitted to was SO bad, but he was so proud of himself. He didn't see what was wrong because his writing skills were very weak. And I'm no F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it was horrific trying to edit it, how can one not see the mistakes if one does not even understand?

In math, they still teach you the formula first and teachers have you write out your steps before you jump in to use a calculator. There was a fundamental skill and basis training first.

But I can see either way, adaptation to ai learning will be in high school and college will manifest, but I don't see in primary school.

Gagarin1961 t1_j1vpyna wrote on December 27, 2022 at 7:28 PM

> We had a web dev at work who used an AI writer to make copyright for an email blast and what he submitted to was SO bad, but he was so proud of himself. He didn’t see what was wrong because his writing skills were very weak.

That’s because school failed him at teaching him reading comprehension.

This is what I want schools to teach: how to actually use this tech usefully.

Yes I know some people will use it to think for them, but that’s why we have to start teaching now how to understand what it’s actually outputting.

> In math, they still teach you the formula first and teachers have you write out your steps before you jump in to use a calculator.

That’s what I want for essay writing

> There was a fundamental skill and basis training first.

Why wouldn’t we still teach that?

> But I can see either way, adaptation to ai learning will be in high school and college will manifest, but I don’t see in primary school.

So what? The discussion was using AI in essay writing, and since the vast majority of that happens at the higher level, you would think that that is what most people would be referring to.

Nobody said we shouldn’t teach kids how to write.