I'm sure AI is going to do even more damage but COVID was an important factor here as well.
Education itself has lost access to the tools that were making it cheaper and easier to teach.
Learning something is a side effect of overcoming friction. AI removes friction.
I’m using ChatGPT to learn German. I can immediately adjust its responses and language level(it says I’m at A2/B1) and tell it how I want to study.
I find it to be a far superior tool than anything else I’ve used.
If education is all dependent on the use of AI, then we're cutting off everyone but the most wealthy from access to education. Seems very regressive to me.
1. This is an assumption but I think it's fairly well established that current LLM prices are far below operating costs of inference, so prices will go up, maybe not 10x but some multiple > 1
There’s a lot of individual anecdotal responses that people come up with in these threads, and I’m happy for the positive examples.
I do think people are capable of extrapolating, especially since all of us have the experience of seeing students wanting to escape studies as kids.
It’s identical to the gym problem, everyone wants to be healthy and fit, but the effort sucks and we avoid it.
Education at scale is the same issue. We basically nurture/force crops of students over a 20 year time span.
The people who wanted and could learn by themselves always had the possibility to do it with books, audio and videos, and AI just add a layer of interactivity on top. Self-learning never replaced standard education, even in the high bourgeois class because they answer to different problematics.
ChatGPT might work for you learning German because you have a reason to care about learning it, but for most kids the goal of school is getting good grades, not learning.
The first thing I did was ask it to continuously adjust its difficulty level based on my replies(A1-C1), it told me I’m in the A2-B1 span. Then I formalised my training on Akkusativ and Dativ, which is basically A2 level.
I have structured the lessons like this:
Every day I wake up with a new lesson. It starts with the nominativ/dativ/akkusativ table. Now I’ve also added wechselpräpositionen including translation to Swedish. It then gives me 5 sentences for me to fill out. If I have time and energy, I continue the exercises throughout the day.
This allows me to continue the practice at my own pace and at my own time.
I only type and read. I can already pronounce quite well but this may be the next step.