Technology

It's as if some notable proportion of humanity suddenly switched to eating nothing but vaguely food-shaped plastic, then a study concluded that that might have negative effects nutritionally.

No shit?

no shit!

You mean the computer program that removes the critical thinking aspect of school instruction is having detrimental effects on americas children and their excecutive functions? Say it ain't so.

If your kid becomes dependent on you to continue wiping his ass well into his 30s, thats a failure of the parent. We are raising a generation of students who are dependent on machine statistics, not reason, to decide whats correct and right. God help us all.

It's important to have these studies, even though the result is predictable. People who want to move toward restricting AI in schools need something more than anecdotes to point to as justification.

I've been interviewing software engineers for many years, and this was the first year the "AI natives" started graduating and applying for jobs.

Never had such a high rate of people completely unable to write one line of code in a language that appears on their CV, it's been about 50% in the last few months where I had to end the interview during the warmup question.

Replace “school” with any place that ai is used and this headline holds true.

Edit: spelling

When I was in year 12 of high school last year, some students attempted to use ChatGPT to write their practice exams for them. Mind you, these practice exams are the same as proper state mandated exams, where there are to be zero electronics used whatsoever unless it’s a disability aid, but the practice ones are also just that, to practice your skills, not to write it off as some worthless obligation.

There were actually heaps more of these students who entirely used LLMs for their assignments, would be made to rewrite them because it’s AI written, then proceed to have ChatGPT write it again and pass it through a ‘humaniser’ which just made it unreadable. It’s alarming that these people are willing to stop using their mind at all just because some service from half way across the world wrote an essay better than they could before.

Well, no shit.

Just wait until you find out how many teachers are relying on it

Grok is that true?

I use AI to my advantage, as long as it's still at the "free until you're addicted" stage. I found that it's particularly good as a language teacher - learning new languages is one of my hobbies.

However, i am over 70 and will not fall into the "let AI tell me what to think and then think it" trap; i can see through it. This ability should be taught first at school, before the kids can use the useful side of the tool. But most teachers themselves are used to make the kids think what they want them to think, so I doubt that it will work.

Fork found in kitchen

Well obviously. AI is a bubble, which is mostly vaporware. The point was always to sell it, and what better place than a school? The administration will force it on the teachers and students, and that's that.

The technology itself is simply irrelevant. All you need to know is that it's a bubble and the purchasers don't care what the users think, and then failure is guaranteed.

We had a recent faculty retreat to deal with this issue. The result was measures going back to the future.

No more online quizzes and exams, pen and paper.

No more PowerPoint slides shared with class.

1/3 of lectures are on the whiteboards again.

People are getting into medical schools cheating with AI. We have students getting A+ without ever showing up. We are now seeing a record number of students getting withdrawn from medical and graduate schools because they faked it until they didn't make it.

Headline within the decade:

Study says AI ~~in schools may~~ be doing ~~more~~ harm ~~than good~~

Because why would removing all creative and high paying proletariat jobs leaving only the worst and lowest paying ones, offloading all critical thought to shitty machines based in drought stricken areas that are destroying water availability, and eliminating online discourse, ever possibly backfire for the proletariat.

Study says sky is blue. Study says eating food is necessary for survival. Study says your mom is smokin'. More on this and other shit we already knew at 11.

The way I see it, AI is just another log on the fire, although it is indeed a big log. The use of laptops and the prevalence of smartphones all damaged kids’ attention spans, then came the advent of short form content which further degraded their ability to stay focused and now we have AI slop summarizing what we see with our own eyes and taking agency away from their very brains. Somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that more tech is good for education, and I think that needs to be rethought. We need to get kids back to reading and writing the old school way. There’s neuropsychological benefits to it that you just don’t get from typing or scrolling on computers. And this problem exists even outside of the classroom or kids. It’s a problem with all generations. I’m noticing just as much mental decline in older populations as younger ones.

"may?"

No shit, Sherlock.

"May be doing more harm than good" but, honest question, is there evidence it's doing any good in schools? I know I'm probably not going to get a balanced opinion here, but is the bad outweighed by good, or is the bad outweighed by neutral at best?

AI is not a substitute for experience. Too many people assume that it can be.

File under "Duh"

Cross post to not the onion

2 things:

1. The article is from Jan-2026;
2. This is the actual article.

"May"

We already have studies outside of AI on how bad not doing well the critical thinking for oneself is. It is literally impossible for this to not be detrimental.

Study also suggests that water is wet.

Shocked pikachu meme...