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77 sats \ 5 replies \ @Scoresby 12 Aug \ on: Should universities embrace or crack down on student AI usage? AskSN
If universities are training kids to do things that can easily be done by AI, perhaps they should consider training the youth to do something else.
I think the question is similar to the calculator analogy. Why do we train kids to do arithmetic when calculators can do it much faster and better? Because we think the innate ability to understand arithmetic unlocks higher order thinking that the calculators can't do.
There's probably an argument to be made here about AI as well. It's just much harder to point to exactly what skills are being lost by AI use, and how they feed downstream into higher order skills.
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Ideally that would be true, but in my experience a lot of students still lack basic skills by the time they get to university. It's a sad product of our education system and also pushing higher education on everyone, even those who otherwise wouldn't be interested
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Do you have thoughts about how one should introduce AI to children (I'm thinking particularly in my context as a homeschooling parent).
So far I've done a little vibe coding with my kids, focusing more on how to prompt than anything else.
I've also had them use it a little for research tasks, but I did find that this led to less thorough research. They (my kids) surprised me that they didn't want to keep asking questions about a topic, but were kind of fine with the first answer they got and just tried to regurgitate that on paper.
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Yeah, that's the million dollar question. I don't think anyone knows exactly just yet. But I think the example of your kids just accepting the AI's first answer is what educators are afraid of. Will they learn how to think critically about AI responses if they've never searched for sources or tried to synthesize research on their own?
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