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It's not so clear that AI is an amplifier.. The paper has some fascinating analysis on this topic:

"At the other end of the distribution, AI students who spend more than 65 minutes on their homework receive homework and exam scores similar to those of non-AI students, suggesting that these students do not use generative AI for homework assignments. However, this group consists entirely of students who adopted generative AI no more than Öve months. Six months after adoption, no AI student spends more than 65 minutes completing their homework (see Figure A5). This is consistent with the gradual process of learning how to use AI tools. It also suggests that AI crowds out the highest level of e§ort."

"Interestingly, in the range of 50-65 minutes, the median and the interquartile range of exam scores of AI and non-AI students are similar. This implies that, in the range where AI students and non-AI students have overlapping homework times, students who spend the same amount of time completing homework on average receive similar exam scores."

"This pattern shows that students who spend the same amount of time on homework learn similarly, with or without generative AI. In other words, generative AI reduces time spent learning for the majority of AI students but not learning efficiency for those who spend the same time studying as the non-AI students."

The scary thing is that 81% of AI users in this study were determined to be "outsourcing" their homework to the LLMs - and the rate increases the more exposure they had to LLMs.

The "slightly higher" performance is based on statistically insignificant samples (between 4 and 20 students, depending on the context, out of the total population of 26,000): https://bsky.app/profile/benjaminjriley.bsky.social/post/3mt...

> I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good.

Same can be said of technology in general tbh.

You aren’t being cynical, you’re arguing with disingenuous entities with money on the line. We already know it’s used primarily for the negative case. Everyone who ever intended High School or College knows this.

The dangerous thing about amplifying is that bad people are often more willing to amplify their activities, because they don't care about the negative effects. We are seeing this now as AI companies (and large companies of all kinds) rush to secure whatever advantages they can, regardless of the negative externalities. Meanwhile people who actually care about doing the right thing get trampled.

We need to shift the incentives by adding ruinous penalties for things that are currently quite commonplace if they are done by large players. Some dude training his own AI on his own computer can scrape and train. The fine for OpenAI or Meta using a single copyrighted book without permission should be in the tens or hundreds of millions.

What we're seeing currently in our society is a "loophole inversion" where the rules have an effect mainly via their loopholes. The most profitable activity is to find loopholes and exploit them as frenetically as possible to gain as much advantage as you can before the loophole is closed, or get people hooked on the loophole so it's retroactively legalized. Entities that are big enough to do this are big enough because they have lots of money behind them. Entities doing the same kinds of things without lots of money are not really doing much harm. So the best approach is to adopt a "sliding scale" in which even tiny violations by wealthy actors result in penalties enormously greater than fairly large violations by small players.

This is my thoughts as well! It makes smarter people smarter and dumb people dumber!

> Homework should be optional material for self study

At Caltech, homework was assigned but had no bearing on your grade. The grades were based on the midterm and final exams.

But not mastering the homework usually resulted in flunking the exams. There were "retch" sessions after each homework assignment that was staffed by a grad student, and the purpose was to help the students understand the homework problems. I knew only one person (Hal Finney) who was so smart he didn't need to do the homework.

I learned the hard way that the path to success was:

1. never miss a lecture, no matter what

2. take notes by hand during lecture

3. do the homework on time, and make sure you understand every problem. Take advantage of the retch sessions.

And that worked for me.

Unlimited retakes would be an enormous amount of work for professors/TAs/teachers.

Optional homework is often a disaster. At best, students would do it right before an exam and the goal of education is not to just pass exams. They’d probably still get a lower score than if they did the homework when they were supposed to.

What I think is better is to have a due date, but just make the maximum 10% each day it is late. So after 2 days, the highest score you could receive would be 80%.

I liked that system because it gave some flexibility with deadlines while still encouraging you to turn things in on time.

The study was done in China, where making the class easier to improve pass rates isn't really a thing, as the Gaokao operates more like a stack ranking where it doesn't matter much how well you did in an absolute sense, only that not too many others who did better than you are competing for the same spot. Unlimited retakes are possible in theory, except each costs you a year of your life and except for some extreme cases of repeat test-takers, most people are going to give up after just one or two bad results. Homework is definitely not optional, but going home from school is. (Due to the hukou system, children often have to go to school far from where their parents work, so boarding schools with teacher-supervised self-study are common.) I don't see how holding back for individual classes is supposed to work considering scheduling conflicts.

> F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time

Do you have evidence for this beyond your friends (who were accepted into college)?

> If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.

this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.

It's all cute but naively glances over what this all boils to - competition.

Education system, contrary to popular belief/name, isn't tailored to educate but to select winners and losers which then will be picked on the job market.

That's why it seems absurd when you think about it as an institution that aims to educate. That's because that isn't the real purpose of it. The purpose is to stratify and classify early.

Schools do not operate in a vacuum; they serve as credentialing gatekeepers for a hyper-competitive capitalist job market. If everyone could easily retake exams until they got an A, grades would lose their primary utility for employers and universities: differentiation. Society relies on schools to provide a neat hierarchy of candidates that for one reason or another thrived in difficult environment of adolescent schooling.

The system often prioritizes compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering over actual critical thinking precisely because those traits align with corporate hierarchies.

> Homework scores once predicted exam performance

As with most training the journey is the point, not the destination.

That said, I think smart use of AI could help. It could explain concepts in a way that might help you understand better, it could probe your knowledge in a more dynamic way by tailoring questions, and so on. This requires the AI be restrained by some harness, not free to write down the answers for you.

School has always been about creating compliant workers, not educating people. They will double down on "performing the right things" and "morals" while the economy will continue on its K shaped path as AI gets more capable.

To extend this analogy:

Using the forklift as a spotter and to assist in loading weights increased gains. Then again, a human can do all those things, and provide real human connection.

Way before AI, the problem was very similar - universities do not teach practically useful stuff. Its been a permanent complaint about the education system, really, at least for the last 50 years.

AI just gave the students a way to dodge the slog.

But university was never intended to teach the bleeding edge. That would really be impossible in practice. Pre-phd, it is supposed to teach ways to efficiently attack a problem. you can take a bunch of "play courses", and succeeding at any of those requires pretty much only that one skill.

Nowadays, the challenge they face, is to keep teaching "problem attack methods" in a way that can't be trivialized by AI.

Though fundamentally, if you go to university, and evade learning the one thing you can learn there - thats your loss.