A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12 (Jessica Grose, NYT)

[highplainsdem]

My thanks to usonian for the link.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/trump-ai-elementary.html
https://archive.ph/JJfG6

-snip-

There are already many schools across the country that are integrating A.I. into the curriculum, though I fear that in many places it’s being done without appropriate forethought or data privacy safeguards. “What I can say with a fairly high level of confidence is that A.I. is being forced upon schools without any particular context or funding that would allow them to make informed decisions about what may or may not be valuable to them,” said Alex Molnar, the director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.

If A.I. is carelessly incorporated all the way down to pre-K, it will be a horrible mistake. It could inhibit children’s critical thinking and literacy skills and damage their trust in the learning process and in one another. As my newsroom colleagues reported last week in “A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse,” the hallucinations may always exist. But even more to the point, when we automate the most connective human tasks, like teaching, and relegate that to systems that can get basic facts wrong, it can lead to rot all the way down.

And for what? Research takes time, but for now, there is not even conclusive evidence that A.I. improves learning outcomes when compared with human teaching of older students. One study of nearly 1,000 Turkish high schoolers from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania compared two groups of students who were allowed access to different versions of OpenAI’s GPT-4 when studying for a math exam with a control group of students who had no generative A.I. resources. Students with access to generative A.I. did much better on practice tests for which they could use the A.I. But when all of the students were given an exam with no access to A.I., the control group with old-school study resources outperformed the group who studied with A.I.

Over the past week, I heard from many parents across the country about their views on A.I. in the classroom. I could not find one person who supported its use in elementary school, even among parents who used A.I. at home to generate creative work with their kids. (One dad explained how he and his children write poetry with large language models, and it sounded charming.) Many of them told me that when they asked school administrators questions about data privacy protections in the A.I. programs already in use, they were not given straight answers.

-snip-

The reference to AI being able to damage students' trust in the learning process was apparently about how the author, Jessica Grose, had overheard a group of middle school students she was driving talk about teachers they had contempt for, including one they believed was using AI to grade their papers.

I don't agree with everything she writes here. There's nothing "charming" about a dad using a chatbot to write poetry with his children, or to generate any sort of creative work. Using AI that way is teaching children how NOT to be creative - to let AI do it for them instead.

But in the same paragraph, she mentions parents having privacy concerns about their children using AI in school. And those are important concerns.

[SheltieLover]

1. This slop should be illegal!

[DUU]

2. AI works both ways...

I expect there will be services that sell Generative AI detection.
This is just another measure / countermeasure / counter countermeasure path in life.