The debate began after a Princeton professor questioned Claude's efficacy.
Not to say it won't be true ever but I think this says more about Princeton and current academia.
“AI is demoralizing.”
A Princeton Professor says he kept wondering this semester (while lecturing) if his students would be better off learning from Claude:
Many users praise AI like Claude as an on-demand personal tutor providing interactive guidance beyond lectures, while appreciating professors who acknowledge its strengths without defensiveness.
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The problem with this logic is that books... literally libraries... have exceeded the typical teacher's knowledge for a thousand years.
Teachers are doing something much deeper than copying knowledge from their brains to students. And I don't think AI touches that just yet.
“AI is demoralizing.”
A Princeton Professor says he kept wondering this semester (while lecturing) if his students would be better off learning from Claude:
@alexolegimas This. MOOCs answered this already. Information is free. Discipline isn't.
@alexolegimas AI is far better than YouTube courses or university professors. You can have back-and-forth conversations with Claude as much as you want, with as much detail, explanation style, and problem-solving approach as you need.
@krishnanrohit What's amazing is during COVID professors all recorded and uploaded their personal lectures on core curriculum to YouTube instead of linking students to a better lecture on the same topic by a better professor. A LOT of academia is already UBI and performative self-soothing.
@krishnanrohit honestly rare self-awareness here
@alexolegimas also why assessment matters for education — inflation kills incentive to show up
@alexolegimas Years ago I'd have predicted big effects from ready access to serious books, journals, and instruction from world-class experts. Misfire. Broadly speaking, the public is indifferent, showing little or no grasp of why and how those opportunities might be personally valuable...
@iamtrask The ideal situation would be one expert human tutor for each student. The next best thing is one AI tutor for each student. The mismatch occurs in a class of 300 when everybody learns at a different rate but the class goes at one rate.
@alexolegimas Much like a regularly scheduled personal trainer appointment.
Pre-AI I thought “active learning” techniques like doing group activities and having students present in class etc. was just a way for instructors to get away with doing less work. Now that I’ve been using these techniques for the past 5 years or so, I’ve come to realize that they are not only among the few pedagogical approaches that can’t be co-opted by AI or any (existing) technology; they also add value to the learning experience above any beyond what AI can offer. Needless to say, I think maintaining value of classroom education moving forward will require incorporating these kinds of techniques,
@krishnanrohit Actually what he's missing is that even at Princeton most of his students just won't. Spending few hours online to learn from better teachers has been possible for a while. Now easier yes. But they won't do that. Median student motivation & behavior hasn't changed. Maybe worse.
@alexolegimas that's true to some extent but i don't think AI is quite like those resources you mentioned. AI is more of a personal tutor. You can talk to it and ask it to elaborate on anything you don't understand, on the spot. You can't really do that with any of those other things.
Nobody knows with certainty in which direction learning / teaching will develop. But we can still make predictions. Alex Imas has spent a lot of time thinking about the impact of technology, so I tend to take his observations and predictions seriously, while recognizing that the amount of uncertainty about the future is huge.
@alexolegimas Lol yeah and the course's textbook. I think someone feeling despair as an instructor about AI for this reason reveals that they had an unthoughtful approach to teaching. That they just viewed themselves as a smart guy who goes in and talks at students.
@ptuomov @alexolegimas That progressive professor arguing with you has to wrapping his head around the idea that tech is a substitute for his ideas on training
@ptuomov @alexolegimas One way of thinking about it is that really smart peeps have always been able to learn maths &c from a book on their own. Ben Franklin, Fredrick Douglas method. Most have trouble with just books, & videos do that.
@alexolegimas @sebkrier professors are the personal trainer, not the dumbbell
@alexolegimas I want to push back here– the primary responsibility of education should not be to force feed information to its students, (though we cannot accept the formation of consensus around falsehoods, either), but to challenge their ability to reason and defend their arguments.
@alexolegimas Personal anecdote, take it for what you will. Using LLM as an immediately accessible, inexhaustible, nonjudgmental tutor feels much closer to the instant gratification of video games than those more passive forms of consumption
@alexolegimas Right across the socioeconomic spectrum, the dominant view of education is that it's a formally structured and somewhat coercive enterprise with fixed start and end markers. Hard to overcome this, sometimes even in the context of bringing along grad students to independent...
