My thoughts exactly. What is the baseline here? Teachers already give biased and/or inaccurate information at a rate much higher than I have seen in ChatGPT.

Heh, when Texas dictates what gets into schoolbooks.

"What happened between 1850 and 1960 regarding civil rights"

A: "Oh nothing, it was great for everyone"

History is a mess here. That said it would be nice if it were incorporated with written texts, lessons, and the AI so you can bounce questions off of it.

Is there a name for this fallacy (is it a fallacy?). I feel like we see the same issue with self driving cars crash rates. People are hesitant to adopt because they aren't perfect, but ignore that it's better than the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy maybe?

Colloquially: "Don't let perfection stand in the way of greatness."

I'll don't think it's a fallacy. People are more predictable and can be accountable for their actions, and even admit ignorance, eg answering "I don't know ask someone else".

It's worth discussing if we want AIs replacing them - maybe the scalability is better, but these are usually worse.

> People are more predictable and can be accountable for their actions...

I would disagree. I think that at this stage, ChatGPT is very predictable, and we have excellent statistics on how likely it is to respond correctly to a particular type of question. I would have much less predictability about any particular human teacher, who might have an especially good or bad day.

Also, ChatGPT can be much more accountable, in the sense that when issues pop up, a filter can be implemented to prevent these particular issues for arising again. I don't see how humans are better in this regard - even if they are "accountable" in some vague sense, it can take many months to get rid of an underperforming teacher, and can take decades to change something across the system.

There is being misinformed and making a mistake when reasoning. Then there is making s** up.

Most humans have the decency to not do the latter while AI (at the moment) freely makes up complete lies when it doesn't have the answer instead of just admitting it doesn't know.

At least misleading instruction from teachers tends to be of a sort that others also experience, so can later be addressed en masse (e.g. mythologized history, poor-but-common explanations for things like how airplane wings work). Or spreading the same political propaganda that can be found all around, so is pretty easy to spot.

It's not usually that you ask them a question they can't answer, and they just confidently make up something entirely wrong, and possibly also an incorrect explanation that few or no other people have seen.

It's a different kind of wrong. One can write a book addressing common misconceptions picked up in school, from human teachers, and cover much of it. Does that work for lies AIs tell? They could be about almost anything, they could be broadly wrong, they could be subtly wrong, et c. "Show me some things my teachers may have been wrong about" seems to me an easier request to adequately address than "show me some things my AI tutors lied about", because the former tend to cluster around a kind of common space and form an experience with a great deal of overlap between students, while I'm not sure the latter do.

I suppose that this is true. But at least with an AI under your control (as a Khan Academy admin), you can run a query to analyze any unexpected decrease in student performance, find correlations with changes in the keywords that these students received from the AI tutor, isolate the particular misleading AI outputs by running some (possibly automated) experiments, and then once identified, fix the problem systemically by prompt engineering, fine-tuning or output filtering.

What's the analog of that with human teachers, and how long would it take to implement a solution there? Even if you had all the budget in the world, how would you go about making all teachers stop misleading students about how airplane lift works?

Problem is, we see it as authoritative source than as a regular teacher.