What I find strange: my students (german school system, 11th grade) let chatGPT do the creative work (like inventing a character for a play). That was what I liked in school the most.
Creativity is not a tap that you turn on and off. Sometimes it is hard to be creative, even if you enjoy it. Even if you are good at it.
When a student feels pressure to perform, and they have an LLM to fall back on, they can poison the well of their creativity. LLMs are that tap that they can always turn on.
Then soon enough they no longer want to put in the effort. Why, when an LLM can do it perfectly right now?
> Then soon enough they no longer want to put in the effort. Why, when an LLM can do it perfectly right now?
Assuming we get to the point where the output of these models is adequate for the task, I don't think that's a problem.
Sure, we'll end up with many fewer poets, playwrights, songwriters, photographers, and the like - but those we do have will be doing it because they're passionate about it. They'll be doing it in spite of the economics, not because of them.
I'm in my 40s, and very much a software engineer at this point. I don't want to do anything else professionally if I can help it. Yet, I have a Fujifilm X-Pro3 sitting on my desk right now. I've got about $5k in lenses in my bag, and still love photography. I've done it professionally. I know with certainty that I can sustain my family on it as a career, and I know how much work that is. I'm not interested.
Instead, I'm mostly the "official photographer" for my wife's side businesses. I take on jobs here and there for friends and acquaintances when they seem fun and interesting. I do just enough to keep my name out there in the community, so I can fall back to it if my "real job" goes away unexpectedly -- which is always a possibility working for startups!
Basically, I do think creative fields will shrink significantly. I agree that we'll see AI-generated art used more and more frequently. The quality will improve - though, honestly, there is already a market of almost unlimited size that wasn't being served by humans because the expected value of those works didn't justify their creation.
In fact, that's also a good point: a rise in AI-generated art usage does not necessarily mean a fall in human-created art. I think it will mean less human art and fewer human artists in time, but that may not be the case. It very well could be the case that most brands use AI, but those that want to set themselves apart as particularly high quality or luxury will lean more heavily on human artists than ever before.
What I liked most about school was not having school. Thankfully after I left the German school system and finally was allowed to learn something in university I enjoyed that.
I don’t see why we don’t move kids more quickly to a university style education if they show that they can handle it. The 7 hour of class time per day (but don’t worry, you can do your homework in class) doesn’t seem that great anymore, it’s just a grind and sets you up for real failure when real learning begins in college (3 hours of classes a day but 9-12 hours of homework/studying).
Most people will put in the least effort they can possibly get away with. Indulging this and training this habit in a generation of students is not going to go well.
The system is already badly misaligned. Even ambitious students may consider it a better use of their time to use tools like LLMs to grind out more standardised points than use them to gain deeper understanding of a subject they may not consider important. Any STEM student targeting finance is basically uninterested in most of the subject matter, for example. This also far predates AI.
The suckers who actually want to learn will get even more badly screwed in such a system unless the assessment is balanced to favour actual knowledge. And not only at final assessment but from start to end because if you get screwed in the short term because your low marks while you get to grips with the subject gets you penalised, it takes a lot of foresight and fortitude not to buckle and just spam for points. Doing it "right" requires more teacher engagement, more parental engagement and generally more autonomy, effort and money all round. And even then you have the ever present problem of which group do you spend each marginal unit if effort on: the stronger or weaker students?
> The system is already badly misaligned. Even ambitious students may consider it a better use of their time to use tools like LLMs to grind out more standardised points than use them to gain deeper understanding of a subject they may not consider important. Any STEM student targeting finance is basically uninterested in most of the subject matter, for example. This also far predates AI.
That's not a misalignment. That's your "ambitious student" is being unwise and stupid. To this day, I have gaps in my knowledge and skills that I regret because I avoided things that I, in my childishness, did not consider "important" or "interesting." AI is going to make that far worse.
Maybe, but you can also get into some very lucrative careers by grinding points, cheating, colluding and generally gaming the system. I know of lots of people who got top-class STEM degrees and yet had barely any actual skills in the subject beyond what they needed to pass exams. They don't give a fuck they didn't really understand thermocouples or river formation or whatever. They answered the formulaic exam questions by rote and checked every marking criteria of the list for their coursework.
If AI makes their kids miscalculate and end up failing in a revamped AI-resistant educational system that actually requires learning to pass, I'll laugh.
> you can also get into some very lucrative careers by grinding points, cheating, colluding and generally gaming the system
Or, more likely, you're going to fail because you can't do the things you need to do to be successful in said careers. Or, at least, you're going to struggle because you're not very good at it.
I've met plenty of bad engineers, and let me tell you, their job seems a lot more stressful than mine. I'll pass.
Unwise and stupid people sometimes "get into some very lucrative careers?" Film at 11. "The problem currently exists in a less severe level" is not any justification for making that problem worse.
