The other day I read this piece on how AI is already being used in schools, and it left quite an impression on me. https://archive.is/IW4B3
> The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.
I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).
Yeah, I cannot imagine how anyone could learn anything well with access to AI. I am grateful that I finished my schooling before AI hit mainstream, because it is just too easy to turn your brain off and just AI a question before thinking about it. Great for getting things done, useless for learning. I guess hallucinations still keep us on our toes.
"Useless for learning" is just wrong. I've found LLMs immensely useful for directing my learning projects. Of course, a lot of the actual learning must come from doing things and puzzling through them myself. But I now find LLMs to be indispensable in finding out what I need to learn to accomplish a task, finding keywords to search on Wikipedia or in textbooks, and answering questions when I'm confused about something.
It's worth remembering that this isn't that. What the poster describes is constant pushing from the Chrome OS designed to train dependence on the tools and to essentially checkout of the education process. In my opinion this is definitely useless for learning.
Part of the difference in your case is the motivation for learning. Many of us in grade school had a motivation to get good grades/pass a class outside of the pursuit of knowledge. Even for those of us that really liked to learn, it was usually directed at a certain subject matter and not everything that we would need to be successful as adults (I loved math, but would never willingly write an essay if I could get away with it). Because grade school kids are "forced" to learn things they do not want to, they always look for the easiest way to get through the material, and AI provides a way to do this.
I agree with your general point, but if people are going to use AI regardless, the question is whether we should teach young people how to use it effectively. If they don't learn this, they're more likely to use it a way that hampers their development.
Now, I don't know at what level that should begin. Probably somewhere around the high school level, when they're learning to do research projects and synthesize information from multiple sources, is when teaching AI literacy will be most important.
What value to a person does teaching "how to use it effectively" deliver?
How does that benefit their development, learning, society as a whole?
Before you start in with "it'll help them get a job", full stop - education as a public good isn't strictly vocational technician work. It's not a work training for companies.
I would not say that. My child asks the AI factual questions the same way she would ask an adult. That's one kind of learning. There are others, of course.
When I say AI, I obviously don't mean using AI like people used to use search engines. Of course asking it factual questions like it is an encyclopedia is okay.
> If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.”
To be fair, making slideshows sucks and I've never met anyone that actually enjoys the experience. I'm sure some people out there enjoy it, but anything that gets me out of PowerPoint faster is a win in my book.
There are two parts of making a slide show:
1. Visualizing what you want to show
2. Finding tools to show it
Developing 1 means you need to start with pen and paper without any pollution from existing tools. You might read and experiment beforehand and use as many tools as possible (including AI) but at least once before you make thr final version you should sit down and just think from scratch what you want to show.
Then you can use AI for 2. Teaching kids 1 is very difficult while simultaneously giving them access to AI since they are too young to develop that self control.
If you care about the information and communication, and you think you can do a good job of the slide deck if you think through it for this venue and audience -- and maybe even have new insights by going through the process -- then it can be enjoyable/rewarding.
But I've also seen situations in which the presenter doesn't care, or the slides are just a backdrop for some better communication/selling/maneuvering they're doing, or they know the information is bogus or the presentation pointless, or they know the audience doesn't care, or for everyone it's just a meeting to be able to say you had a meeting.
I'd guess that at least half the current use of LLMs is for "cheating on your homework" tasks, in which the person prompting it simply doesn't care -- whether it's for schoolwork, professional work, or socializing.
It's the same thing as shoeing away Clippy, right? I don't know, I'm a little out of the loop. I do feel like there's some societal backlash to technology that's cascading down to the younger generations now that the negativity of social media is bearing fruit. Right?
It's never been about making education better. It's about building and legally mandating a money hose directly from your town property tax levy to accounts receivable at Google and Microsoft and OpenAI.
The conflict of interest is pretty obvious. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are backing a bill that funds teaching kids to use... OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft products. "AI literacy" as defined in the bill is literally "the ability to use artificial intelligence effectively."
That's not literacy, that's onboarding lol.
Real digital literacy teaches how systems work, who profits from them, and how to think critically about them. This bill will in practice hand curriculum design to the same vendors who endorsed it.
Teaching kids to prompt ChatGPT is not the same as teaching them to understand what ChatGPT is. Nobody funding this wants the latter.
well, tv got that ball rolling a few generations ago; people learn by doing not watching something else do it for them, now ai will not just tell them or show them but do it as well it would seem...
this is what apple products did as well. They turned something that took some effort and desire (i.e. using a computer) into streamlined entertainment. Watch someone use their phone; it's passive, one-way consumption.
wouldn't it be fun to hear the lobbyists' reactions to "Great idea, we'll run an instance of DeepSeek locally in the school's computer lab, trained with data from each individual school for a personalized experience. Thanks for the money, guys!"
A lot of those were definitely sponsored by MS and co as well, but at least you did learn a practical, transferable, morph-able skill. You'll come out of that with experience using the features and structures of a general purpose OS, as well as the workflow of mode-base production software (in some cases). Excel at least is also just such a powerful 'everything' tool that I'm not even that mad about it.
'AI Literacy' is just very much not that at all and is just state-mandated brain rot.
I was started on learning how to make PowerPoint presentations and present them in kindergarten, and I'm incredibly thankful for that. More broadly, building a slide deck is a critical part of public speaking and presenting and helps kids out a lot.
In third grade I got taught how to type properly and hit 60-70 WPM, which is roughly where I still type to this day when doing tasks that require thinking instead of just doing a pre-compiled speed benchmark.
Kids really need to learn the fundamentals of things, but on the other hand some of the same arguments came out when calculators were going mainstream and classes just evolved to take the new tools into account. I think eventually we'll see the same thing happen with AI, but I'm not sure what that will look like for every case yet. Probably more paper and pencil work tbh
I hate the calculator argument. Kids still need to learn how to do basic arithmetic by hand. There's a reason that CAS calculators are banned on standardized tests. Even in college, I had classes where profs would force us to do complex calculus by hand even though Mathematica could spit out the answer. Understanding things from first principles is important, and probably even more so with AI!
Any sort of "X Literacy" raises red flags for me. Actual _literacy_ - as in, being able to critically read and comprehend stuff of sufficient complexity - is basically a superpower that makes learning all these other skills possible, and it seems to be in terribly short supply.
We had the same requirement at my high school in Sacramento back in the early 2000s. I was given the option to test out of it, since I already knew how to use Office, which I had been using at home since fifth grade for reports and presentations. I had to study harder for Excel and Access, since most high school students don’t need sophisticated spreadsheets or databases, but I passed the exam on my first attempt.
A far better computer literacy course was the one I took at Sacramento City College as a dual-enrollment student in summer 2004, which was the prerequisite to programming courses. Even though I already knew how to program in QBASIC, Visual Basic 6 and C++, I still had to take this course. Anyway, we learned very basic computer architecture (the roles of the CPU, memory, storage, buses, etc.), the role of the operating system and the difference between it and applications, computer networking, the Web (with an introduction to HTML and CSS), the history of computing, and a brief introduction to programming, with exercises in C++ and even Scheme (the professor showed us his copy of SICP and threatened students who talked during his lectures with Scheme homework assignments).
It was a fun class. The professor knew I was a Linux fan, but I had a hard time downloading a distro at home due to my having dial-up. He gave me some FreeBSD install CDs. I became a fan of FreeBSD since, and exploring FreeBSD led me down a rabbit hole where I devoured the history of Unix and BSD. By the time I graduated from high school, I wanted to be a systems software researcher like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. This shaped my early career; I’ll never forget meeting Marshall Kirk McKusick my senior year of college at USENIX FAST 2009.
Turned out that computer literacy course I was required to take at Sacramento City College despite having computer literacy had far-reaching impacts in my life.
I had the same experience in the UK around 2005 to 2011, I wonder if it's the same everywhere?
I feel that my experience was far worse and bordering on the absurd and bureaucratic. We spent years following instructions, taking screenshots of us opening specific windows and dialogs in Office etc, saving all these screenshots into a Word document, and then printing the document.
To be clear, it was every single action you took. Moved the mouse to "Insert"? Don't click it yet, take a screenshot of your mouse on the "Insert" button, and then click it, and take a screenshot of the menu that opened. Then, take more screenshots of moving your mouse to buttons and lists in dialogs that opened. Then, take a screenshot of the document with the thing you just inserted.
Now, write several paragraphs in detail about what you just did. Print everything, and that includes both the document you just created for the exercise and then the document writing about the document creating exercise with all it's dozens of screenshots.
Each individual printed piece of paper needed to be kept in a plastic wallet, which was then kept in document folder. In the end we had multiple of these document folders that were without a doubt a complete waste of paper and time.
The argument was that it was needed in case the exam board decided it needed to double check the teachers scores, which I think never happened once anyway. There was never once a reason given for why each individual piece of paper needed to be put in a plastic wallet.
This was during a period of time where CS education at schools had essentially totally vanished from the curriculum for decades, it was added back after I'd finished school.
Words cannot describe how much I despised the entire ordeal. There simply are not enough words to describe the total absurdity of an IT class requiring screenshots of clicking buttons and being printed onto paper.
While the teacher was trying to explain how to add PowerPoint transitions I was writing scripts that would fetch currency conversions and graph them because I was that bored. One time I write some terrible "chat" system via some type of free shared HTML/PHP hosting and meta tag based auto refreshing of the chat history for a few class friends to talk across the room.
Not the first time this has happened. There was a big push for schools to teach windows and microsoft office while conveniently ignoring other things exist. Nowadays some have moved to the google office suite which isn't that much better
> Young people increasingly hate AI[1], and children already struggle with AI-enabled harassment that traumatizes them and disrupts their learning. And studies show kids are offloading learning onto AI models, undermining their education and social development.
that's true, but if calling a crash was that easy, it would have been priced into the market already. regardless of when the crash occurs, I think we can all agree that the current form of AI is financially unsustainable. How much would you allow if you paid its true cost? $300/mo, $500/mo $1k? for intern-level slop.
AI, in the form of LLMs, should be used as an augmenting tool and not as a substituting one. The human must conceive the idea, design the solution and fill most of the gaps. The AI will only refine, improve and suggest options upon an already existing base. As a parent I promote such a use to my kids, rather than ban AI which is futile and might become dangerous in the future.
There is a class of such thing that could be useful. I will likely be teaching my children this literacy myself. Obviously the interstitial pop-ups don't work, and the next generation will not be coming to this technology from the point of view of watching it develop. They will see it as having always existed and while they may be appropriately sceptical, I suspect they will be far more trusting of it. So some degree of understanding the mechanics will probably allow them to learn to treat this technology appropriately.
After all, it's nigh magical stuff. A machine that talks to you in common language and is almost always right. If you weren't already prepared for it, you would trust it implicitly. When Wikipedia first came onto the scene, people behaved this way there too. They would believe it was entirely correct. But at some point there was a concerted effort in pedagogy to say things like "You can't cite a Wikipedia article" and that one simply-remembered rule allowed for children to be forced to treat it as an aggregator.
Naturally, setting up a fund for this is nearly always a bad structure. Earmarked funds have a bad habit of ending up being written to be primarily a vehicle to transfer money to pet constituencies. Teachers unions and so on are always advocating for these because that's what funds the complex ecosystem of teacher educators, the certification and curriculum development programs, and so on. This is just social welfare by a different means. Funds should be flexibly used to meet some outcome. Earmarked funds have a habit of ratcheting up. When there is no need for programs, they continue to exist, and bleed money from the actual work product of education - informed students.
I get why these articles are always written in this style but I really would appreciate some better news media. Students hate a lot of things. Their opinion is mostly moot as to whether a subject is a good thing to learn or not. And all this polemic style of "shoehorn" and so on is completely unnecessary, and just makes me treat this whole thing in the realm of some partisan Twitter post.
But the one thing I did appreciate is a link to the text of the bill.
Putting all the cynicism side.. it's amazing how big the changes in how we deal with information in our life time changed..
When I was younger, to solve a problem, we had to memorize a large amount of information. Or know someone who does. Or visit libraries and pray they have a book on what you need.
Then came the internet. All of that memorizing was replaced by web searches. You just focus on solving the problem, figuring out what you don't know and searching for that.
Now, it feels like we're automating the searching, connecting the dots and most of the problem solving. We focus on the high level problem description, verification of the results.
I wonder what they'd be adding to this curriculum.
If by "AI literacy" they mean "learning how AI works and how to use it effectively", then this probably would wind up backfiring. Because when you improve people's AI literacy, they use it less. They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI.
Of course, they probably plan to do to education what iPads did to education: deskill children. Apple successfully abliterated the concept of a file from a generation of students by making them do their computing in a straitjacket. I can only imagine how an AI-first or AI-only educational curriculum could make kids even worse at using computers.
> They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI.
Like the time I got given a swelling tablet at work to dispose of and had to go through phone tag to get an answer on what to do with it or how dangerous it was. And my coworker asked "if [I] tried asking AI?" I said I am not relying on ChatGPT for something that might explode, I'll wait for the person who's paid to tell me about this thing that might explode.
I'm going to do everything in my power to keep this dog shit technology away from my daughter for as long as I possibly can. I can imagine implementations that I might be willing to consider for educational applications, but given these companies' demonstrated and profound lack of restraint in cramming AI into literally everything they sell, I almost can't believe anyone who doesn't work for them is suggesting that we should expose children to their products in the same context where they are supposed to be learning.
I can already see a fight on the horizon and it won't be easy. My kid is in a catholic school and they do try to instill some good habits, I am seeing some teachers just kinda checking out. Previously, it was watch a movie/we in class. Now it will be: play with AI. At that point, I might have to submit a withdrawal from class.. If she is gonna use it anyway, I might as well have a say in it.
Maybe a more general focus on getting students to practice critical thinking and fact-checking would be better. AI could be addressed as a small part of that, since chatbots are everywhere and students need to know how to filter out their BS.
But are NSF grants really necessary for this? To what degree is this funneling taxpayer money to buy ChatGPT subscriptions and advertise to students by getting them to use AI in the classroom?
This is the reason I recently ran for my kids school board. I use AI every day and I think there is a lot of utility there, but I don't want it anywhere near my kids school. Honestly, I don't think kids need to even lay eyes on a screen until they are in highschool.
Where to buy the subscription, how to convince parents to buy Pro instead of Plus, prevent original thought as early as possible, so they stay addicted - sorry I meant empowered - asap.
I thought AI was so easy to use no one would have to be trained? Are they going to teach the kids to steal copyrighted data? And write AI slop articles? And to evangelize useless side projects as time savings?
Come on, AI can work both ways. It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject. It's also easy to use AI to prevent yourself from having to learn anything.
> It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject.
It's actually not.
It's easy to get an AI to say a lot about a subject, but that doesn't mean anything the AI said was true. There's a significant risk that the AI has simply hallucinated the information, and now you "know" a bunch of false ideas about the subject, which is worse than not knowing anything about it.
Double check what the AI tells you. Apply common sense instead of blindly trusting everything. If it's something technical in nature try to verify and test it.
I treat AI as any other information I see online with the added value that it's customized exactly to my needs and it works pretty well for me.
Yeah and I'm betting there's gonna be a whole lot more "press the button to have all your work done for you" students than "work hard" students. FFS even before all this there's been an alarming number of students attending college who have to take remedial classes.
It's K12 so I'm honestly not going to try to take that dunk, as satisfying as it'd be, as plenty of things which seem blazingly obvious/intuitive to adults are complete mystery to a pool of kids where being able to read to learn (instead of the other way around) is a recent development.
Unfortunately, the AI literacy big tech companies want to push won't align very well with the AI literacy kids need. It'd be like ad literacy for K12 being pushed by Google - obviously what's delivered would not match what the kids actually needed.
If you're curious about these questions, you'll be happy to review the links from the source article, which include statements from two Senators and the head of the largest US teacher's union about what they hope for kids to learn.
Will the kids who miss the important parts of training miss out on being able to use AI effectively? It should be easy enough for them to use without training…
Why do you presume that it should be easy enough for them to use without training? Keyboards are a pretty simple technology, and serve as a subset of the primary interface to most modern AI models, but training is still required to use them well. A user who's never learned proper keyboard skills will type much more slowly and with much more frustration than you or I can, and that will have meaningful impacts on their ability to perform tasks requiring a keyboard.
It's just a kind of training that's receded into the background as "normal", and that many of us who enjoy recreationally typing out comments on the Internet self-taught.
I didn’t learn writing, speaking, research skills from typing out comments on the internet. I was required to use hand written note cards up until I graduated high school (heck even had blue book tests in college). The first paper I ever wrote was hand written. When we did start using computers, none of those skills were altered by passive internet chatting.
So AI training is going to be a basic communication course? Because AI is sold as being easy to use without training and as modeled after existing human social constructs, hence artificial intelligence.
This is entirely backwards. AI should be used as a tool to tutor kids. Kids shouldn't be learning about AI. I thought the point of AI was that people didn't have to know anything to talk to it. Not to cheat at writing exercises.
Writing exercises that children produce in school are immediately thrown into the trash after being graded and reviewed. The product is supposed to be better educated children, not better written papers.
The entirety of school should eventually be replaced with just this one class. AI is able to teach people anything they may want or need to know and it can design effective ways for people to study. Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century.
You know why most kids don't do this already, because they don't know what they don't know. Telling a 2nd grader to go learn anything they want is not going to have the result you apparently think it will.
This level of naivety is characteristic of certain SV types where wishful thinking is the order of the day. We're already living through the disastrous effects of the "social media" revolution and this is going to be much more of the same, with even worse negative effects on society.
Just imagine what this will do to critical thinking, interpersonal relationships and family dynamics in a country where illiteracy is rapidly climbing. I don't think it's a stretch to write that if the unrestrained capitulation in terms of societal costs towards big tech continues, we're setting ourselves up for {generational, class-based} conflict that will rip our country to pieces.
Maybe so. Still, learning how to tell when the AI is blowing smoke is going to be an important skill, and I'm not sure that AIs are going to be great at teaching that to you.
And learning when other people (AI salespeople, say) are blowing smoke is also an important skill. Again, I'm not sure that AIs are great at teaching that.
The other day I read this piece on how AI is already being used in schools, and it left quite an impression on me. https://archive.is/IW4B3
> The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.
I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).
Yeah, I cannot imagine how anyone could learn anything well with access to AI. I am grateful that I finished my schooling before AI hit mainstream, because it is just too easy to turn your brain off and just AI a question before thinking about it. Great for getting things done, useless for learning. I guess hallucinations still keep us on our toes.
"Useless for learning" is just wrong. I've found LLMs immensely useful for directing my learning projects. Of course, a lot of the actual learning must come from doing things and puzzling through them myself. But I now find LLMs to be indispensable in finding out what I need to learn to accomplish a task, finding keywords to search on Wikipedia or in textbooks, and answering questions when I'm confused about something.
It's worth remembering that this isn't that. What the poster describes is constant pushing from the Chrome OS designed to train dependence on the tools and to essentially checkout of the education process. In my opinion this is definitely useless for learning.
Part of the difference in your case is the motivation for learning. Many of us in grade school had a motivation to get good grades/pass a class outside of the pursuit of knowledge. Even for those of us that really liked to learn, it was usually directed at a certain subject matter and not everything that we would need to be successful as adults (I loved math, but would never willingly write an essay if I could get away with it). Because grade school kids are "forced" to learn things they do not want to, they always look for the easiest way to get through the material, and AI provides a way to do this.
I agree with your general point, but if people are going to use AI regardless, the question is whether we should teach young people how to use it effectively. If they don't learn this, they're more likely to use it a way that hampers their development.
Now, I don't know at what level that should begin. Probably somewhere around the high school level, when they're learning to do research projects and synthesize information from multiple sources, is when teaching AI literacy will be most important.
What value to a person does teaching "how to use it effectively" deliver?
How does that benefit their development, learning, society as a whole?
Before you start in with "it'll help them get a job", full stop - education as a public good isn't strictly vocational technician work. It's not a work training for companies.
I would not say that. My child asks the AI factual questions the same way she would ask an adult. That's one kind of learning. There are others, of course.
When I say AI, I obviously don't mean using AI like people used to use search engines. Of course asking it factual questions like it is an encyclopedia is okay.
It’s such a lazy way of integrating AI as well, as if they asked AI to do it.
Why has no one tackled the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer? We know what AI-enhanced education should be, and we finally have the tech to build it.
"You're absolutely right, Nell. I shouldn't have confused ethylene glycol with propylene glycol. Would you like to know more about funeral services?"
> If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.”
To be fair, making slideshows sucks and I've never met anyone that actually enjoys the experience. I'm sure some people out there enjoy it, but anything that gets me out of PowerPoint faster is a win in my book.
There are two parts of making a slide show: 1. Visualizing what you want to show 2. Finding tools to show it
Developing 1 means you need to start with pen and paper without any pollution from existing tools. You might read and experiment beforehand and use as many tools as possible (including AI) but at least once before you make thr final version you should sit down and just think from scratch what you want to show.
Then you can use AI for 2. Teaching kids 1 is very difficult while simultaneously giving them access to AI since they are too young to develop that self control.
If you care about the information and communication, and you think you can do a good job of the slide deck if you think through it for this venue and audience -- and maybe even have new insights by going through the process -- then it can be enjoyable/rewarding.
But I've also seen situations in which the presenter doesn't care, or the slides are just a backdrop for some better communication/selling/maneuvering they're doing, or they know the information is bogus or the presentation pointless, or they know the audience doesn't care, or for everyone it's just a meeting to be able to say you had a meeting.
I'd guess that at least half the current use of LLMs is for "cheating on your homework" tasks, in which the person prompting it simply doesn't care -- whether it's for schoolwork, professional work, or socializing.
David Byrne seems to like it: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03...
I haven't seen his actual slide deck anywhere online though.
Back when I created them (high school), I enjoyed it, because it was about making an appealing presentation about the data we researched.
It's the same thing as shoeing away Clippy, right? I don't know, I'm a little out of the loop. I do feel like there's some societal backlash to technology that's cascading down to the younger generations now that the negativity of social media is bearing fruit. Right?
> I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece,
It's not about being anti-AI, it's about being anti-distractions in education.
These companies don't want to raise "AI literacy", they want to get to their future users young.
We had chromebooks in schools before AI - or iPads, depending on the area. We're about to repeat that disaster.
It's never been about making education better. It's about building and legally mandating a money hose directly from your town property tax levy to accounts receivable at Google and Microsoft and OpenAI.
dystopian :( i hope schools put more pressure on keeping that off their devices. or switch to neos.
The conflict of interest is pretty obvious. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are backing a bill that funds teaching kids to use... OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft products. "AI literacy" as defined in the bill is literally "the ability to use artificial intelligence effectively." That's not literacy, that's onboarding lol. Real digital literacy teaches how systems work, who profits from them, and how to think critically about them. This bill will in practice hand curriculum design to the same vendors who endorsed it. Teaching kids to prompt ChatGPT is not the same as teaching them to understand what ChatGPT is. Nobody funding this wants the latter.
we'd have raised a generation of users not builders. thats exactly whats about to happen with AI if this passes as written.
well, tv got that ball rolling a few generations ago; people learn by doing not watching something else do it for them, now ai will not just tell them or show them but do it as well it would seem...
this is what apple products did as well. They turned something that took some effort and desire (i.e. using a computer) into streamlined entertainment. Watch someone use their phone; it's passive, one-way consumption.
wouldn't it be fun to hear the lobbyists' reactions to "Great idea, we'll run an instance of DeepSeek locally in the school's computer lab, trained with data from each individual school for a personalized experience. Thanks for the money, guys!"
It reminds me of the 'IT Literacy' classes we had when I was in high school where they just taught us to use Microsoft Office products.
A lot of those were definitely sponsored by MS and co as well, but at least you did learn a practical, transferable, morph-able skill. You'll come out of that with experience using the features and structures of a general purpose OS, as well as the workflow of mode-base production software (in some cases). Excel at least is also just such a powerful 'everything' tool that I'm not even that mad about it.
'AI Literacy' is just very much not that at all and is just state-mandated brain rot.
I was started on learning how to make PowerPoint presentations and present them in kindergarten, and I'm incredibly thankful for that. More broadly, building a slide deck is a critical part of public speaking and presenting and helps kids out a lot.
In third grade I got taught how to type properly and hit 60-70 WPM, which is roughly where I still type to this day when doing tasks that require thinking instead of just doing a pre-compiled speed benchmark.
Kids really need to learn the fundamentals of things, but on the other hand some of the same arguments came out when calculators were going mainstream and classes just evolved to take the new tools into account. I think eventually we'll see the same thing happen with AI, but I'm not sure what that will look like for every case yet. Probably more paper and pencil work tbh
I hate the calculator argument. Kids still need to learn how to do basic arithmetic by hand. There's a reason that CAS calculators are banned on standardized tests. Even in college, I had classes where profs would force us to do complex calculus by hand even though Mathematica could spit out the answer. Understanding things from first principles is important, and probably even more so with AI!
One of the bright lights of that class was knowing how to bring up the "Flight Sim" easter egg in Excel.
Any sort of "X Literacy" raises red flags for me. Actual _literacy_ - as in, being able to critically read and comprehend stuff of sufficient complexity - is basically a superpower that makes learning all these other skills possible, and it seems to be in terribly short supply.
We had the same requirement at my high school in Sacramento back in the early 2000s. I was given the option to test out of it, since I already knew how to use Office, which I had been using at home since fifth grade for reports and presentations. I had to study harder for Excel and Access, since most high school students don’t need sophisticated spreadsheets or databases, but I passed the exam on my first attempt.
A far better computer literacy course was the one I took at Sacramento City College as a dual-enrollment student in summer 2004, which was the prerequisite to programming courses. Even though I already knew how to program in QBASIC, Visual Basic 6 and C++, I still had to take this course. Anyway, we learned very basic computer architecture (the roles of the CPU, memory, storage, buses, etc.), the role of the operating system and the difference between it and applications, computer networking, the Web (with an introduction to HTML and CSS), the history of computing, and a brief introduction to programming, with exercises in C++ and even Scheme (the professor showed us his copy of SICP and threatened students who talked during his lectures with Scheme homework assignments).
It was a fun class. The professor knew I was a Linux fan, but I had a hard time downloading a distro at home due to my having dial-up. He gave me some FreeBSD install CDs. I became a fan of FreeBSD since, and exploring FreeBSD led me down a rabbit hole where I devoured the history of Unix and BSD. By the time I graduated from high school, I wanted to be a systems software researcher like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. This shaped my early career; I’ll never forget meeting Marshall Kirk McKusick my senior year of college at USENIX FAST 2009.
Turned out that computer literacy course I was required to take at Sacramento City College despite having computer literacy had far-reaching impacts in my life.
It sounds like you actually learned something in your class, though?
Logo, MS Office, Counter-Strike 1.0-1.6, PHP, War§ow, Quake, ..
01010101 0123456789ABCDEF AND OR XOR, ..
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing
I had the same experience in the UK around 2005 to 2011, I wonder if it's the same everywhere?
I feel that my experience was far worse and bordering on the absurd and bureaucratic. We spent years following instructions, taking screenshots of us opening specific windows and dialogs in Office etc, saving all these screenshots into a Word document, and then printing the document.
To be clear, it was every single action you took. Moved the mouse to "Insert"? Don't click it yet, take a screenshot of your mouse on the "Insert" button, and then click it, and take a screenshot of the menu that opened. Then, take more screenshots of moving your mouse to buttons and lists in dialogs that opened. Then, take a screenshot of the document with the thing you just inserted.
Now, write several paragraphs in detail about what you just did. Print everything, and that includes both the document you just created for the exercise and then the document writing about the document creating exercise with all it's dozens of screenshots.
Each individual printed piece of paper needed to be kept in a plastic wallet, which was then kept in document folder. In the end we had multiple of these document folders that were without a doubt a complete waste of paper and time.
The argument was that it was needed in case the exam board decided it needed to double check the teachers scores, which I think never happened once anyway. There was never once a reason given for why each individual piece of paper needed to be put in a plastic wallet.
This was during a period of time where CS education at schools had essentially totally vanished from the curriculum for decades, it was added back after I'd finished school.
Words cannot describe how much I despised the entire ordeal. There simply are not enough words to describe the total absurdity of an IT class requiring screenshots of clicking buttons and being printed onto paper.
While the teacher was trying to explain how to add PowerPoint transitions I was writing scripts that would fetch currency conversions and graph them because I was that bored. One time I write some terrible "chat" system via some type of free shared HTML/PHP hosting and meta tag based auto refreshing of the chat history for a few class friends to talk across the room.
And yet that generation knows how to use computers, and the current generation doesn’t
this is a step beyond the drug dealers who give you the first sample for free. Attempts at legally mandated injection sites.
Not the first time this has happened. There was a big push for schools to teach windows and microsoft office while conveniently ignoring other things exist. Nowadays some have moved to the google office suite which isn't that much better
the textbook companies give the hard sell too but it's more honorable with traditional palm greasing and what not
> Young people increasingly hate AI[1], and children already struggle with AI-enabled harassment that traumatizes them and disrupts their learning. And studies show kids are offloading learning onto AI models, undermining their education and social development.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g...
The coyote is already running beyond the cliff so indoctrinating kids won't save them from an AI winter 6-18 months away.
I swear that I read this same "6-18 months" timeframe 3 years ago.
that's true, but if calling a crash was that easy, it would have been priced into the market already. regardless of when the crash occurs, I think we can all agree that the current form of AI is financially unsustainable. How much would you allow if you paid its true cost? $300/mo, $500/mo $1k? for intern-level slop.
AI, in the form of LLMs, should be used as an augmenting tool and not as a substituting one. The human must conceive the idea, design the solution and fill most of the gaps. The AI will only refine, improve and suggest options upon an already existing base. As a parent I promote such a use to my kids, rather than ban AI which is futile and might become dangerous in the future.
This is way too close to the Simpsons joke about the periodic tables provided by Oscar Mayer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohXWbMrXZI
Of course they will back it up. Nice source of income.
There is a class of such thing that could be useful. I will likely be teaching my children this literacy myself. Obviously the interstitial pop-ups don't work, and the next generation will not be coming to this technology from the point of view of watching it develop. They will see it as having always existed and while they may be appropriately sceptical, I suspect they will be far more trusting of it. So some degree of understanding the mechanics will probably allow them to learn to treat this technology appropriately.
After all, it's nigh magical stuff. A machine that talks to you in common language and is almost always right. If you weren't already prepared for it, you would trust it implicitly. When Wikipedia first came onto the scene, people behaved this way there too. They would believe it was entirely correct. But at some point there was a concerted effort in pedagogy to say things like "You can't cite a Wikipedia article" and that one simply-remembered rule allowed for children to be forced to treat it as an aggregator.
Naturally, setting up a fund for this is nearly always a bad structure. Earmarked funds have a bad habit of ending up being written to be primarily a vehicle to transfer money to pet constituencies. Teachers unions and so on are always advocating for these because that's what funds the complex ecosystem of teacher educators, the certification and curriculum development programs, and so on. This is just social welfare by a different means. Funds should be flexibly used to meet some outcome. Earmarked funds have a habit of ratcheting up. When there is no need for programs, they continue to exist, and bleed money from the actual work product of education - informed students.
I get why these articles are always written in this style but I really would appreciate some better news media. Students hate a lot of things. Their opinion is mostly moot as to whether a subject is a good thing to learn or not. And all this polemic style of "shoehorn" and so on is completely unnecessary, and just makes me treat this whole thing in the realm of some partisan Twitter post.
But the one thing I did appreciate is a link to the text of the bill.
Proof the people running things are stupid I guess.
As a teacher, if permitted to teach about and have students use chat bots, I think I'd focus on prompting first.
The best results I read about on here using LLM's have to do with prompt mastery I think.
Putting all the cynicism side.. it's amazing how big the changes in how we deal with information in our life time changed..
When I was younger, to solve a problem, we had to memorize a large amount of information. Or know someone who does. Or visit libraries and pray they have a book on what you need.
Then came the internet. All of that memorizing was replaced by web searches. You just focus on solving the problem, figuring out what you don't know and searching for that.
Now, it feels like we're automating the searching, connecting the dots and most of the problem solving. We focus on the high level problem description, verification of the results.
I wonder what they'd be adding to this curriculum.
Now, it feels like we're even offloading
So far AI is funding illiteracy in schools
If AI worked as advertised then "AI Literacy" would just be "Literacy".
If by "AI literacy" they mean "learning how AI works and how to use it effectively", then this probably would wind up backfiring. Because when you improve people's AI literacy, they use it less. They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI.
Of course, they probably plan to do to education what iPads did to education: deskill children. Apple successfully abliterated the concept of a file from a generation of students by making them do their computing in a straitjacket. I can only imagine how an AI-first or AI-only educational curriculum could make kids even worse at using computers.
> They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI.
Like the time I got given a swelling tablet at work to dispose of and had to go through phone tag to get an answer on what to do with it or how dangerous it was. And my coworker asked "if [I] tried asking AI?" I said I am not relying on ChatGPT for something that might explode, I'll wait for the person who's paid to tell me about this thing that might explode.
I'm going to do everything in my power to keep this dog shit technology away from my daughter for as long as I possibly can. I can imagine implementations that I might be willing to consider for educational applications, but given these companies' demonstrated and profound lack of restraint in cramming AI into literally everything they sell, I almost can't believe anyone who doesn't work for them is suggesting that we should expose children to their products in the same context where they are supposed to be learning.
Almost.
I can already see a fight on the horizon and it won't be easy. My kid is in a catholic school and they do try to instill some good habits, I am seeing some teachers just kinda checking out. Previously, it was watch a movie/we in class. Now it will be: play with AI. At that point, I might have to submit a withdrawal from class.. If she is gonna use it anyway, I might as well have a say in it.
Got to train serfs early!
Gotta get em hooked while they're young.
I remember "media literacy", "digital literacy" and "smartphone literacy". Why is no-one pointing out the obvious?
Maybe a more general focus on getting students to practice critical thinking and fact-checking would be better. AI could be addressed as a small part of that, since chatbots are everywhere and students need to know how to filter out their BS.
But are NSF grants really necessary for this? To what degree is this funneling taxpayer money to buy ChatGPT subscriptions and advertise to students by getting them to use AI in the classroom?
This is the reason I recently ran for my kids school board. I use AI every day and I think there is a lot of utility there, but I don't want it anywhere near my kids school. Honestly, I don't think kids need to even lay eyes on a screen until they are in highschool.
What is ‘AI Literacy’? How to prepare a prompt for maximum token efficiency?
Where to buy the subscription, how to convince parents to buy Pro instead of Plus, prevent original thought as early as possible, so they stay addicted - sorry I meant empowered - asap.
The Chromebook has already been an unmitigated disaster for computer literacy, this will only make it worse.
What a big waste of $, for an example how did the 'coding' schools go ? AI literacy will go the same way.
How about funding something useful ? Like real literacy as in reading books ? That will help kids out far better than "AI literacy".
Imagine telling parents that the new teacher they hired to teach their children just makes shit up like 30% of the time.
It will be interesting to see the backlash to this one.
The thing about AI is it'll teach you how to use it (aka 'AI literacy').
Why think for yourself when you have ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to do all the thinking for you?
The owners of these systems do not even use the technologies that they are creating.
The deskilling programme will continue, until morale improves.
I thought AI was so easy to use no one would have to be trained? Are they going to teach the kids to steal copyrighted data? And write AI slop articles? And to evangelize useless side projects as time savings?
Kids don't need to be trained in AI but the models do need to be trained by kids.
The drug dealers get to get them hooked young.
Come on, AI can work both ways. It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject. It's also easy to use AI to prevent yourself from having to learn anything.
Both kinds of students will exist.
> It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject.
It's actually not.
It's easy to get an AI to say a lot about a subject, but that doesn't mean anything the AI said was true. There's a significant risk that the AI has simply hallucinated the information, and now you "know" a bunch of false ideas about the subject, which is worse than not knowing anything about it.
Right because without AI everything you read on the internet is 100% true and correct.
Learn how to use AI properly just like any tool and you can benefit.
Can you explain the differences between using AI "properly" and "improperly" for learning?
Double check what the AI tells you. Apply common sense instead of blindly trusting everything. If it's something technical in nature try to verify and test it.
I treat AI as any other information I see online with the added value that it's customized exactly to my needs and it works pretty well for me.
> Both kinds of students will exist.
Yeah and I'm betting there's gonna be a whole lot more "press the button to have all your work done for you" students than "work hard" students. FFS even before all this there's been an alarming number of students attending college who have to take remedial classes.
It's K12 so I'm honestly not going to try to take that dunk, as satisfying as it'd be, as plenty of things which seem blazingly obvious/intuitive to adults are complete mystery to a pool of kids where being able to read to learn (instead of the other way around) is a recent development.
Unfortunately, the AI literacy big tech companies want to push won't align very well with the AI literacy kids need. It'd be like ad literacy for K12 being pushed by Google - obviously what's delivered would not match what the kids actually needed.
If you're curious about these questions, you'll be happy to review the links from the source article, which include statements from two Senators and the head of the largest US teacher's union about what they hope for kids to learn.
Will the kids who miss the important parts of training miss out on being able to use AI effectively? It should be easy enough for them to use without training…
Why do you presume that it should be easy enough for them to use without training? Keyboards are a pretty simple technology, and serve as a subset of the primary interface to most modern AI models, but training is still required to use them well. A user who's never learned proper keyboard skills will type much more slowly and with much more frustration than you or I can, and that will have meaningful impacts on their ability to perform tasks requiring a keyboard.
It's just a kind of training that's receded into the background as "normal", and that many of us who enjoy recreationally typing out comments on the Internet self-taught.
I didn’t learn writing, speaking, research skills from typing out comments on the internet. I was required to use hand written note cards up until I graduated high school (heck even had blue book tests in college). The first paper I ever wrote was hand written. When we did start using computers, none of those skills were altered by passive internet chatting.
So AI training is going to be a basic communication course? Because AI is sold as being easy to use without training and as modeled after existing human social constructs, hence artificial intelligence.
Of course they do when it must be taught on their products which will hook the users in time and make some money.
This is entirely backwards. AI should be used as a tool to tutor kids. Kids shouldn't be learning about AI. I thought the point of AI was that people didn't have to know anything to talk to it. Not to cheat at writing exercises.
Writing exercises that children produce in school are immediately thrown into the trash after being graded and reviewed. The product is supposed to be better educated children, not better written papers.
The entirety of school should eventually be replaced with just this one class. AI is able to teach people anything they may want or need to know and it can design effective ways for people to study. Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century.
You know why most kids don't do this already, because they don't know what they don't know. Telling a 2nd grader to go learn anything they want is not going to have the result you apparently think it will.
But the AI does. It can create plans for a target career. It can evaluate English skills. It can provide suggestions based off the person's interest.
> Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century.
But I thought the models are so good we don’t need humans anymore?
This level of naivety is characteristic of certain SV types where wishful thinking is the order of the day. We're already living through the disastrous effects of the "social media" revolution and this is going to be much more of the same, with even worse negative effects on society.
Just imagine what this will do to critical thinking, interpersonal relationships and family dynamics in a country where illiteracy is rapidly climbing. I don't think it's a stretch to write that if the unrestrained capitulation in terms of societal costs towards big tech continues, we're setting ourselves up for {generational, class-based} conflict that will rip our country to pieces.
Maybe so. Still, learning how to tell when the AI is blowing smoke is going to be an important skill, and I'm not sure that AIs are going to be great at teaching that to you.
And learning when other people (AI salespeople, say) are blowing smoke is also an important skill. Again, I'm not sure that AIs are great at teaching that.