A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
⭕ Study groups are disappearing.
⭕ Office hours are emptying out.
⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.
⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
Can we PLEASEEEE not shoehorn “TIL” into being just another repository for news stories? Imagine if I posted in here every day saying “oohhh today I learned what temperature it is outside today”. Clearly against the spirit of the community. Yes, its good information… So please put it where it belongs so that people can easily find it and easily find other things too, rather than mishmoshing all our posts into one unfilterable, uncategorizable blob
Has the MIT published a report on how it’ll try to get AI to commit suicide over copyright infringement?
even a random idiot could have called that last point.
A the ground work for this was laid when search engines were useful. People would stop thinking, they’d just break out the phone and search for the solution to any problem… and they never retained the information, because the because the brain isnt designed to retain information in situations where you can pull the magic slab out of your pocket to do 3 seconds of problem solving for you.
and its only gotten worse with AI. There are people who literally cant even function without an AI telling them what to do anymore, Its taken over their entire lives and doing almost everything for them except telling them when and how to go to the bathroom… and I wager it wont be long before we start having people pissing and shitting themselves because their AI didnt tell them they should go to the bathroom.
They don’t want people to think of ways to rise against them.
yep.
the terrifying consequences of AI use are the final stages of decades of attacks on education… creating the perfect being. A complete, non-functional idiot that believes everything its told without any thought or consideration, and completely non-functional without their masters grace (the AI)
we are quite literally going down the idiocracy pipeline. i sure hope some secret military operation to send 2 completely average people into the future 500 years is taking place
secret military operation
operation electrolytes.
I don’t think the news should be in TIL. TIL should be for info the details of which has been around for quite a while.
Notice that these are also all ways to eliminate the few remaining places where people actually first meet in person, realize they have things in common, form groups/relationships, organize towards common goals…
It’s like they just want two people, sitting in separate rooms, depressed and constantly delivered targeted messages they control about how the other person, in the other room, hates and judges them.
This is long, but worth reading. It probably was warranted at the onset of the internet to be honest; education has changed so little despite memorization to pass a test in many subjects being worth little in the real world now. It would be supremely ironic if the suddeness of the onset of AI and the fact that institutions/educators/learners are all existentially terrified that it can actually led to critical mass that allows for updating the educational model in the US. It won’t change the rapacious nature of current actors but hopefully can allow society to better manage and process what is being forced on us by PE.
Oh yes, the problem definitely lies in a outdated system that seems to go against how and why people learn. Route memorization is a joke. What we need is a lot of critical thought and deep understanding which is not the goal of universities or more importantly primary education. The fact that you can graduate highschool, let alone college, without critical thinking skills is bonkers.
A college prepetory high school is supposed to and a liberal arts college that is also the goal. So it a bit depends on the institution but the direction has been away from classical learning and philosophy requirements are minimal now.
Critical thinking should be taught in kindergarten and by first grade kiddos should be able to use evidence to discern their own opinions about a subject and provide proof. Anything else is criminally negligent.
thats patently unrealistic unless you mean at the most basic level. Elementary logic is basically at the algebraic level.
I see you are part of the problem with the education system. Good luck!
I had one class in undergrad where the teacher was like “we’re gonna cover far more than you could possibly learn in a semester. I don’t expect you to memorize it all, but you should be familiar enough with it that you could look it up if needed.” But it was a senior-level class that basically was taught with the expectation that you were gonna go into grad school and the tests questions overwhelmingly were about research methods/analyzing results, not the specific details covered in class. It works really well for that class imo, but only because it was niche enough that the next step if you wanted to learn more was either go into research within that field or read primary research papers, so it focused on teaching what you needed for those.
For most other classes, the basic facts are necessary to know to be able to do more advanced thinking. Unless you just want people who just have to blindly access whatever computers tell them is correct because they’ve lost any sense of what a reasonable answer or process is.
Yep, obviously basic knowledge familiarity is helpful, but it’s a push and pull with critical thinking, which I mentioned above has barely been taught in the US while memorizing facts has. Much more balance of the latter is needed in a world full of information.
Yeah. Its frustrating seeing how many people have no idea on how to even attempt math word problems if they don’t just have an algorithm memorized for a specific wording of a question. Or can’t tell when a problem gives additional information that isn’t necessary and complain about such. Real-world problem solving doesn’t just give you number you need and only those numbers.
Yeah. I think a lot of folks make attribution errors. They don’t remember how much introductory work is memorizing stuff, because they haven’t done introductory work in 10-30 years, so they are like 40+ and don’t understand how all their skills and experience make them not have to memorize anything… because they already know tons of stuff.
It’s like… how do you learn a foreign language? You memorize the words, the phrases, and learn the grammar to take the words you learned and put them in the correct sequence… but folks today are like ‘nah I’d rather just use my phone to translate it all and then claim I am speak a foreign language’.
Our issue is our education system isn’t teaching people memorization anymore and hasn’t done that for 20-30 years. That technique was already ‘out’ when i was a middle schooler, and frankly I had to go back and re-learn things later in life because well, I never memorized it as a kid because my school refused to teach us to do that. Like English Language Grammar. Today I doubt kids even know what grammar let alone can identify the basic parts of speech and their functions in a sentence.
Education today is so far removed from the basics. It’s funny… in countries where they do focus on rote learning… their outcomes are better. Because they actually understand knowledge in hierarchical and you can’t learn advanced things without strong foundations of the basic skills that require memorization via repetition…
Yes. Memorizing things is part of building your tool set. You can’t be flipping to look up basic info, or not even aware of it, as you progress. Having a preexisting knowledge of specific information also is necessary for making quick evaluations of situations and problems.
if you don’t know the basic facts and history of your profession, what do you know at all?
memorization is a basic skill. you can’t learn anything without memorization. the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
memorization is how you build pattern recognition.
but please go off on how memorization is ‘useless’ and how schools need to teach ‘critical thinking!’ as if critical thinking can exist without… memorizing the basic fact of anything.
That’s not how the real world has worked in a long time. Memorization of facts is essentially useless. Knowing how to find facts quickly how to analyze facts and how to apply them has far more function in modern society. That’s the difference between memorizing a multiplication table and using a calculator. Why would you memorize a multiplication table when you need to know the basis of multiplication and then utilize a tool to do that work for you much quicker? Its like saying you need to learn to write cursive before typing on a computer.
“I’m ok with my surgeon not having memorized anatomy. He can look it up.”
Funny, they literally already are doing that. Projections in surgery to help surgeons find target tissues and help them you know, remove the tissues they are supposed to.
They are used to target locations of things like brain tumors but you are still expected to know the anatomical layout of where you are going and to confirm it makes sense. Go before a courtroom for a malpractice suit and tell them you don’t know anatomy and relied blindly on some AI tool.
AI tools are now common practice in the hospital and are approved by the FDA. Might want to keep up with how rapid the space is changing. COmpnaies are now literally using Claude to accelerate drug development.
the analogy at the end doesn’t really make sense. the goal of wriiting cursive was to speed up the ability to record information via text. typing and the ubiquity of computers has basically made cursive vestigial. memorization of facts is important to fully grasp complex problems. you don’t need to sit down and memorize by staring at a sheet of paper, but eventually if you look something up enough times, you should be able to memorize it, so that you can mentally go “oh it’s that” and move on, which allows you to juggle multiple of these types of things at a time.
how are you going to quickly analyze whether a fact is true without enough knowledge to verify core concepts? a better example in your rationale would be “its like saying you need to learn chemistry and metallurgy before you can become a mechanic”, which is obviously absurd. but would you trust a mechanic to fix your car after a crash, or properly diagnose if it was totaled, if he had to ask you where the manual is for your car first?
what is the ‘real world’ then?
am I in a fake world, because memorizing shit is what I do all day. I have to do that because it’s my job to know things and teach those things ti other people… I guess my 150K IT security job is ‘fake’ though, right?
how can you find a fact if you don’t eve know what a fact is or isn’t? what if i google a multiplication table and it tells me 2 x 2 = 16? am i suppose to just take that as the ‘answer’ even though I have memorized it’s 4?
Funny, so never would your brain be wrong? You never ever have to reference a book or wiki or anything for your knowledge? You must be a special kind of person then, and one who quickly wouldn’t have new information.
Since you know what 2 x 2 is because you know how to multiply, it’s pretty easy to go ‘hmm, that doesn’t seem correct, let me try something else here’.
But you do not have domain level knowledge of all subjects, and can’t memorize everything. Perhaps you know there are resources for that, and it’s more important to know how to access and synthesize information rather than stuff it into a squishy brain that more often than not get’s ‘memories’ incorrect.
Lol that it’s faster to use a calculator than recall a memorized result.
I am very so so at math and can do an unmemorized calculation faster than pulling out and typing it into a calculator.
You can? That’s impressive. Because you multiplication tables do nothing for you when you start getting into multi digit calculations. The important part is learning how to conduct multiplication, then after that you often will let a tool do it for you.
The point is that memorization doesn’t mean much when you can easily access facts, e.g. through the internet, and now perhaps put them in maybe a useful context situation with an LLM.
Facts without critical thinking is where we’ve gone post-war in the US, and it’s yielded thinking that has gotten us where we are.
right, so why bother with education at all?
let’s just hire 5 year olds with tablets. clearly just as good as a 25 year old with a master’s degree in engineering.
both of them are just gonna google everything and input into the LLM anyway, right?
So what you did there is called logical fallacy called a “straw man”, where you suggest an argument that the other party isn’t advocating as a way of avoiding the actual discussion. Bill O’Riley was famous for them as much if his entire approach to “discussion”, and one of the reasons attempting to debate someone who isn’t seriously interested in a discussion is generally a waste of time.
Best of luck.
No, jackass. You put up the straw man. It’s called ‘memorization’ there.
But I’m not surprised you go around telling other people their arguments are logical wrong, rather than, realize it’s your own that are…
How are you even typing sentences to me in the English language? Maybe because… you memorized the language, it’s grammar, it’s rules, and you use it every moment of every day of your life? Who taught you that, did it just spontaneously occur, or did you learn it by using google?
the very fact you can write comments here undermines your own argument that ‘memorization is worthless’. but your own critical thinking is so stunted you don’t even realize that. you’re under the false impression that you can run a marathon without knowing how to walk, and why bought teaching people to walk, because everyone can just drive a car 26.2 miles rather than walk or run!
You are the reason the education system is so horrid, because everyone thinks like you. And they make arguments to avoid learning the basics rather than… shutting up and doing it. Just like the kids in PE class who would sit out ‘in protest’, who then wondered why it hurt when they ran…
Ad hom, nice touch. Find a hole to scream into.
Experience is still the most critical part. Having the knowledge (not simply knowing facts) and being able to synthesize that knowledge is what makes the 50 year old engineer with decades of experience more valuable than the 5 year old with an LLM.
How do you get experience? oh right… buy doing shit… which is from memory…
You may be a chef and use your recipe book to make recipes, especially ones you haven’t make much, your experience tells you what substitutions you can make, what tweaks you can make, and how to create new recipes. All without memorization.
If it’s a month old, it’s probably news vs TIL.
TIL is supposed to be like an interesting or suprising fact. or an easy overlooked lifehack.
this is like randomly picking a research paper and having chatgpt summarize it, then post it as TIL .
additionally, do we even know that this is a fact? its really just the outcome of their own case study. it probably says something about the intersection of education and technology at the current moment. but that could all change in less than a year.Thanks for posting this. It bothered me too but I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. It’s almost as bad as the soapbox rants that get posted to the asklemmy comms with “What do you think?” at the end.
Appreciate the summary, although I don’t even like holding office hours so I don’t mind that. The rest are depressing, though.
That said… my own experience doesn’t match up on the take-homes being useless. My God the way answers math problems are so bizarrely incorrect that I’ve given more 0s than I have in my entire fucking life.
At least, upside, my holistic approach with a lot of discussion, projects and oral components to assignments are really shining. Helps that my classes are only 25 max though- I can’t imagine how bad 80-300 classes are.
Silver lining is that even before AI, courses were bloated with busywork. Though it likely won’t happen, there’s a possibility that trimming down on coursework would save a lot of people a lot of time.
Save time on learning? Isn’t that where you should take time?
no, silly, learning is a waste of time.
half the people on lemmy basically think education is stupid and pointless unless it immediately and directly needs to employment. they’d rather we stick 13 year olds in internships.
If they only have 5 minutes of homework tonight, then that should be OK.
I had Claude read the results. Sounds like the changes are all positive and nobody should rethink their investments or effect on society at all
I just realised why I find AI enthusiasts so repulsive. I was already aware of how rude it is for someone to share the output from an LLM. Someone sharing an opinion they formed based on such an interaction, I realised is exactly as repugnant, if not more.
Or to put it in a different way: “I couldn’t form my own opinion on the matter. So I shook a magic 8 cube a bunch of times, and the ‘conversation’ we had, is something I think is worth while for others to hear”.
What does MIT have to say about Palestine?
What does that have to do with the topic?
Ya for those who don’t know MIT banned a number of students from their own graduation for protesting in support of Palestine on campus… This was a HUGE deal among both the student body and many alumni. Unfortunately every US college is beholden to the their endowment, and in MIT’s case the massive endowment isn’t primarily from their own alumni. I wouldn’t say this impacts the quality of research occuring on campus though, with such a large endowment they do a very good job separating the funding from the science.
Sincere question: Can anyone explain to me where the youths are finding LLMs that write half-decent prose?
2-3 years ago, I would’ve bet money that the future was gonna be bluebook exams for every subject, but clearly I was wrong. I don’t get how you successfully cheat with ChatGPT in a productive way if you’re writing on paper with the teacher watching, call me old fashioned.
Does it matter if it can’t write half-decent prose if none of your classmates can either and the system just adapts to that to avoid failing 70% of students.
…finding LLMs that write half-decent prose?
They don’t. In fact, newer LLMs are regressing on that aspect.
But I am surprised the institutional response has been so slow. This is existential; every school should be moving heaven and earth to do stuff exactly like blue book tests.
why would they do any of that? it isn’t in their interest.
the goal of most admins is juking stats. it’s not educating kids. thy are only concerned because test scores are going down, if they went up, they’d be worshiping AI.
If no one ever does any of the actual work, then the degree becomes meaningless. Why hire an MIT grad if they no longer demonstrate any of the skills and knowledge that come with 4 years of intense study, practice and research? And once that happens, why pay MiT the cost of a house to educate anyone?
I hate this so much
AI will not make people more productive
I dunno, for me at least it’s less about ‘AI’ making me more productive, but rather automation that absolutely makes me more productive. Ai certainly makes the process of getting automations in place a whole lot quicker. Any time I do something repeatedly that I don’t want to do, it’s the question of ‘how can I automate this process’, and that frees up time for other things, and ensures that what I do is more accurate. That’s not something new because of ‘AI’, but rather python has been the beacon for that for many years, with tons of books on the topic.
Creating efficient automations is the basic must-have-skill of a good engineer. If you outsource that to a slop bot, you surrender to being a replacable mediocre button pusher. And your slop automations will be shit.
I disagree. Certainly for systems architecture you may need a ‘good’ engineer, but you really don’t need to hire someone to automate the routine clicks you are doing every day. Oh look I have to pull and move the same data everyday, can’t I write a python script for that? Yes. And for many who are not programmers, an LLM can easily do that for you, and works just as well as that junior dev who is overloaded and can’t be bothered to do that for you.
You have the right disagree, without being right about it. That “junior dev” mindset is PR speak for “reasons to pay them less”. Actual developers have acquired skills as hobbyists long before entering a job, and will self-train continuously on the job. That’s how you get senior developers. Using a slop bot to generate code is something that 1) an actually skilled dev wouldn’t do because they have zero time gain from it, and 2) it will mean you keep dumb people dumb, never having them learn skills as time passes. Non-deterministic coding assistants are for gullible people who want to license-launder other people’s code and/or wouldn’t ever be able to create any proper software. And yes, that includes people who suffer from brain deterioration after having once been decent devs.
Perhaps. Every senior dev I have talked to absolutely is using AI right now. Slop code is relative.
AI is like the microwave. Sure it is huge time saver to eat a microwave meal but that doesn’t make a good cook obsolete.
Absolutely agree. But the car certainly made horses overall obsolete when it comes to standard transportation.
AI isn’t a car and will never be
The people who are pushing that idea are the ones who will lose billions when it all comes down.
The last Windows Patch Tuesday had almost 1000 patches.
And it fucking broke Windows.
It wasnt broken before?
I should have said broke more.
Yep, lots of stuff to fix. Its been in bad shape for decades.
I publish book reviews on business books, the interactions have almost dropped to zero as have people in those channels. I imagine it’s related.
I try not to have discussions about AI online that are too lengthy, because I know no one really convinces anyone else, but every time I see someone talk about how they use local open weight models and how that makes their AI use ethical I think of scenarios exactly like this. That AI got the information from somewhere and that book or forum post or think piece is not getting the buys/engagement/ad revenue because the AI basically stole it. People aren’t joining communities and adding to a public knowledge base. They are just quietly solving their issue alone without contributing to the ecosystem that helped fix the issue and the ecosystems that sprung up around those.
It feels like a loss of so much. A loss of interest in research, but also of community, of a desire to share. I remember being on forums and knowing that if user X responded it was going to be the most thorough, interesting read. I remember following specific users because even if their post wasn’t directly relevant to me at the moment, I wanted to learn all I could from them. Not to be an old man screaming at a cloud, but I think AI is stripping a lot away from the younger generation that they don’t even know to miss, and I think that’d be true even if AI always provided the most engaging, in depth, accurate responses you could find on the internet.
All true.
This was happening before “AI” though. It’s just more oil for the fire.
I feel every word you typed. 💔
I feel for you. I’m sure for authors, publishers, and consumers that such books and reviews have lost all credibility if sloppers can generate fakes with ease. It’s difficult to know whats real and can be trusted versus what’s just wasting our time.
Without a doubt.
And people who don’t know any better will believe what AI says. I see it at work all the time. People producing pages and pages of slop.
People join calls, output AI notes that clearly show they weren’t paying attention at all.
