The teacher doesnt read, they skim, and they already know who deserves As or Ds.
I was a victim of this. I was a general A or B student, but I thought the funny kids (D students) were funny and hung out with them. I got stereotype graded. My last paper of the year I completely gave up, the least effort ever. Teacher gave me an A and said 'You improved so much!'
The teacher likely didn't know that he used to be my best friend growing up, and at some point was more knowledgable with computers than me. He introduced me to things like IRC. But he became one of the most popular kids at school and started distancing himself from me.
After getting our papers back, he came over to brag about how he found his paper online and that's how we discovered we submitted the same exact essay. At that point in time, I thought the teacher must have assumed he copied from me. But I think your explanation is likely more plausible. I guess the teacher just skimmed the papers and graded based on our expected grade.
It got so bad that his Dad, who was an active English and Spanish teacher at another school, was convinced to write one of his papers for him. He got a D.
An optimization when I was a student was to find out what the teacher thinks and re-affirm those beliefs with a few twists to give an appearance of depth. On occasion, for fun, I would take a dissenting position and I was always punished for it.
I think the entire education system is steeped in orthodoxy such that it's not in its interest to properly teach critical thinking, failing to do so is an emergent behavior / happy accident. There would have to be an environment that would reward students for actual critical thinking and not apparent critical thinking (agreeing with the teacher) and I don't know how to create one, and I especially don't know how to reform the current system.
I still get a bit of a kick out of the idea that the often proposed solution to the mass academic plagiarism, following the replication crisis, is a mass amnesty - which strangely seems to have tacitly occurred as it's no longer even being discussed.
Then I developed a formula that essentially went, "While {common sense assertion is true}, we need to consider the nuanced implications of {regurgitated pros/cons}." Combined with the smooth fluff and flow from using speech recognition with minimal edits, suddenly the A's started rolling in. I later found this of course works wonderfully with standardized testing essays in the GRE and GMAT.
Edit: I realize now why I get (even if I don't fully agree with) the 'stochastic parrot' dismissal of language transformer models, I basically lived it.
Was it?
Anecdotally, my kids' schools (sample size two, both high school) are quite anti-AI in the classroom.
The kids tend to be very much for "do my homework for me", but the education system? No.
Well, it's still early days. Wait until we truly are in a "learn AI skills or be left in the dust" world and AI will play a major role in the classroom. Just like those Chromebooks everyone has now. Because kids gotta have computer skills in order to be prepared for the working world!
There are many similar human behaviors. Why do people smoke, drink alcohol, eat junk food, avoid exercise, and make all sorts of other harmful choices? Because the pleasure is immediate, and the consequences are not.
Same reason people get sunburned. If the sun burned people immediately, like a hot pan in the kitchen, everyone would use sunblock. But because it burns slowly, people walk themselves right into it.
If there is a button to avoid the pain of homework, to immediately go have fun instead, and there are no immediate consequences, all but the most disciplined, determined, and diligent students will press it. Knowing and acknowledging the future consequences makes no impact on the behavior.
Had AI been as prevalent as it is now, I don’t think I would have ever had the revelation. That is why I appreciated the point the author made about the difference between a calculator and LLMs. You have to have some semblance of understanding to put something into a calculator. You need nothing and you gain nothing by copying and pasting into ChatGPT.
But with each passing day we see the opposite, more and more people are converging in one of a few opinions about each topic. This is great if you want to move the world in a specific direction, but I think it demonstrates that people are exercising less their critical thinking abilities.
AI definitely made this worse, but I think it started long before that.
Another factor that I think contributes negatively to this effect is that our society doesn't really like when someone is wrong, or changes ideas. If we want to encourage to use their critical thinking skills we also need to tell them that arriving at bad conclusions is ok, the important thing is to always keep improving.
The counter hope, of course, is that more critical thought will result in more people discovering some abstract truth out there. I don't think that is realistic, either.
The mundane landing spot, I think, is the likely one. For most things, critical thought is just not much of a benefit. Knowledge and understanding are far more beneficial. Is why we don't constantly reinvent how to drive a car. We have largely agreed that we have some mechanisms that work, and it is better to educate folks on how those work, than it is to get people to think critically about the controls.
Going further in that regard, understanding is far more immediately useful than critical deconstruction. Learning about affordances and how they guide you to what you are wanting to do is far more useful to someone's daily life.
Which is not to say that critical thought in designing said affordances is not good. Just, for most of us, we are not in a position to really impact any of that.
I'm not sure how well that reflects people's actual opinions. In many cases I think people don't care much about most topics. They simply accept the position of their allies. Occasionally they even find it abhorrent but necessary.
I think that mass communication has exacerbated that for decades, and AI at most optimizes it a bit further.
I don't really expect fine critical thinking. Most people aren't experts at most things.
But I am a bit surprised at the degree to which people have twisted themselves in knots to justify positions that do not withstand even the slightest scrutiny.
It is an age-old debate between know-that and know-how. Understanding the world around us is the point of education, and this means ways of looking at it, insights or theories, and how these insights and theories come about which is the critical thinking process. I would like to call it thinking from first assumptions since critical thinking as a term is overused and I would argue that AI is great at critical-thinking in the shallow definition of the term.
School teaches the principle of logic (and scientific method) and how to apply it in debates and learning, but not critical thinking. There were words count requirements sometimes, but essays was always about logical arguments for or against some opinions.
It's like when they poll people to ask them how the economy is doing. How the hell would they know? And what do you mean by the economy?
And critical thinking isn't an empty phrase, it's like thinking about the accuracy of statements and analyzing them your self.
Do you take things literally generally? Or struggle with understanding people?
Corollary: since self-driving isn’t a solved problem yet, this proves that cab drivers are already smarter than the Guardian.
“... the most uncomfortable question here is not whether ChatGPT is making teenagers worse at thinking. It is whether the education system ...”
“This is not cognitive dissonance in any simple sense. It is something more structurally interesting ...”
“... opting out is not a principled stand. It is a competitive disadvantage.”
“The students are not confused. They are trapped.”
“... choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.”
“... the problem is not that education cannot protect against cognitive offloading, but that most education systems are not currently designed to do so.”
“... cognitive offloading is not a convenience. It is a developmental short-circuit.”
“... happening not through careful pedagogical planning, but through exhaustion...”
“... students are adopting AI not because they have been taught to use it critically, but because nobody has given them a compelling reason not to.”
“These investments are not philanthropic gestures. They are strategic plays ...”
“These are not neutral actors offering disinterested tools. They are companies with revenue models ...”
“... they are not just choosing a product; they are choosing a pedagogical philosophy ...”
“... Khanmigo is designed not to give answers directly. Instead, it employs a Socratic method ...
“AI did not break the system. It revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, what the system was always building toward ...”
A new long-form article, published every day, like clockwork, since the 1st of June 2025. All about AI, all attributed to the same author.
Congrats to him on finally getting this slop to the top of HN, I guess. Shame on everybody here for upvoting it.
> The students are not confused. They are trapped.
> In this environment, choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.
> Here is where the conversation gets genuinely uncomfortable.
> The culprit was not artificial intelligence. It was standardised testing.
> For them, cognitive offloading is not a convenience. It is a developmental short-circuit.
> This is not merely a problem of laziness or moral failure. It is a predictable consequence (...)
> These investments are not philanthropic gestures. They are strategic plays for long-term market dominance (...)
> These are not neutral actors offering disinterested tools. They are companies with revenue models (...)
> This is not a new insight. It is a well-established finding that anglophone education (...)
> (...) AI is not a threat; it is an upgrade.
> If, however, the purpose of education is to cultivate human beings (...) then the arrival of AI is not the crisis. It is the revelation that the crisis was already here.
> Not more bans. Not more surveillance software. Not more hand-wringing opinion pieces from adults who themselves rely on AI for their professional work.
> But the overreliance they fear is not a new phenomenon introduced by ChatGPT. It is the logical extension of an educational philosophy (...)
The irony here is that the AI generated article gives a full throated endorsement of using LLMs to generate slop; why should we believe that the guy who prompted the LLM to generate slop that says slop generation is good did not himself use the slop generator?
With the rise of LLM, we are questioning the wisdom of public schooling as currently taught.
Ideally, with AI, schooling will no longer require standardized textbooks, lesson plans, and testing. With this technology, customized instruction and guidance will be made for each student. As it evaluates their basic knowledge daily. The hope is with this grunt teaching becoming more automated, actual critical thinking and dialogue will take place in the classroom.
In the past, say 5-ish years, I've been shocked to realize this isn't universal, or at least broadly applicable. Probably more of a result of whatever societal bubble I was born into. I don't know.
The result has been a growing uneasy feeling for me, at work mainly, when discussing just about anything. I have to pause and understand for myself: "Has this person thought through what they are saying?" That's actually become a friction point with me. And it isn't generational from what I've seen.
There is apparently an ideological component to critical thinking. If you are supposed to analyze the world through the lens of what you consider the "one true set of ideas", being critical and "seeing both sides", or even working through the reasoning of others is seen as a violation of the highest order.
This is the first time I have heard of Khanmigo. Is it any good? Anyone here tried it?
The problem that they're going to have with this is that the schools have already been covering for bad teaching and lost students by making all the criteria fuzzy, and relying on homework that kids could cheat their way through for a large part of the grade i.e. credit for participation. Now, with AI, there's no way to deny that kids are cheating, and that's thrown the institution into a difficult position.
There's no educational threat from AI, AI will only help people learn. The threat is to the institution, which runs on a lot of dishonesty. We'll have to learn to tolerate some kids being left behind and make the effort (and create the systems) to move them forward again, instead of pretending like everyone is handling it. A system that can't deal with every kid losing a year of school, like what happened during covid, is a system that is focused more on schedule than student.
The people don't want the slightest fluctuation of whatever complex story surrounds the issue to means a chunk of children fail. In contrast parents would rather as much record fuzziness as possible if it means giving children a 2nd or 100th chance (putting aside the dooming issue that bad tests mean funding cuts).
So I think you'll find that it's not just that records are fuzzy in school, padded up by participation and homework and extra credit, it's that you'll likely be able to predict which regions are fuzzier than others in record keeping.
Also, we need to treat schools like they are daycare. K12 didnt stop getting Trump elected (pre-AI).
We really need a different kind of school system. Daycare(current teachers) and education(a new group of teachers, probably professionals).
You'd have to intentionally expose students to output of weaker models. And still nobody has time for that.
Finland had time.
https://toolbox.finland.fi/life-society/media-literacy-and-e...
https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/finland-has-been-world-leade...
* Up until NCLB, classes were focused more on theory than rote memorization with some notable exceptions. However, the further along I got in schooling/as NCLB approached, the more work shifted towards objective measures of knowledge rather than demonstrable understanding of theories, processes, and problem solving. By the time I was integrated into High School, most classes were graded by objective measures rather than theory - English and Social Studies were graded identically to Math and Science. The focus wasn't on the content of Shakespeare or Dante's Inferno, nor on the geopolitics of The Opium Wars or the history of European Empires; it was dates, people, how the verse was written, marking syllables, etc.
* I got lucky that my gifted status meant I spent time at a local university in grade and middle school at a special campus part of the week. That school taught me some of my most valuable lessons that continue to pay dividends in practical life: how to think critically (a semester learning game strategies with a final exam deducing whodunnit in the movie 'Clue'), appreciating the similarities and unique differences in biological life (basically a deep-dive on animals, insects, and biology half a decade before HS Biology covered the same stuff at a shallower depth), understanding the underlying physics of planetary forces (plate tectonics, volcanism, fault lines, meteorology, etc), music and art appreciation regardless of ability to understand the underlying speech (lots of VHS musicals, arts and crafts, and self-expression), and ample time understanding how computers worked - including building my first programs and coding my first website. None of my "non-gifted" classmates received remotely similar quality of education, focusing instead on rote memorization instead of abstract problem solving.
* The day NCLB was signed, I remember my World History teacher flipping his desk in the classroom. "You lot better pay attention because you're the last class who will ever get this good an education ever again." He spent the remainder of the semester trying to teach World History through his preferred lens of underlying causes, political movements, outcomes, and next-order effects rather than dates and places, with ample essay questions on exams to force you to think critically on what you learned and make arguments for/against something he posited. Subsequent classes were exclusively date-person-place tests for the sake of standardized testing and measurable outcomes.
So when I see people defaulting to AI in a world where measurable outcomes are the only things that matter (grades, KPIs, 'number-go-up'), I can't entirely fault them. I've spent enough time in this system to know my way of thinking is entirely contrary to the incentives at play, and a threat to those who benefit from it. Were I more flexible in my ethics or thinking, I'd do the same to benefit myself.
Except I continue to see growing fatigue of folks who have to deal with this slop on a regular basis. Employers have already pivoted away from AI in interviews and job postings, at least in my IT purview, because the output doesn't justify the lost opportunities of hiring quality talent with critical thinking skills to solve unique problems; they're tired of "BuT cOpIlOt SaId" in meetings as justification for any given thing, and even more exasperated that leadership seems to trust the chatbot when it's wrong more than any employee who is right.
Do I think that attitude will win out in the long run? Not really, no, because the underlying incentives make reliance on AI in lieu of personal/critical thought a better prospect than trying to forge your own identity and path forward. At least for the foreseeable future, those who blindly trust the bot will be rewarded even when they're wrong, while those of us who use it as an untrustworthy peer (or not at all) will be punished for not surrendering ourselves to its output.
