Elmo says AI will soon be smarter than us.Things will get worse as a significant percentage of students secretly use AI to do homework. There has always been a divide between those who care about education for its own sake and those who only care about grades, but AI will worsen this divide, leaving fewer people with the… https://t.co/mdQ9t4B8F2
— derek guy (@dieworkwear) July 23, 2026
AI that is smarter than Elmo is not that high a hurdle. It’s more like a speed bump. A very low speed bump.
Unless and until AI becomes self-aware, it will never be intelligent. AI that doesn’t “know” that legal cases have to exist in order to be in a legal brief (and which doesn’t understand the difference between “existence” as a matter of being, and “existence” as already extant in the world, like a court case opinion), and why that matters (it is quite a bit beyond “acceptable” v. “unacceptable”), cannot be said to be intelligent. So I’m not being flippant to say Elmo is not intelligent. He doesn’t understand what intelligence is; but still imagines he possesses it.
AI has a long way to go to be of more than limited use.
What it won’t do is worsen the educational divide. That’s as bad as it ever gets.
I don't suppose that a teacher could get away with requiring all students to write out everything they submit for grading in the presence of themselves in rooms cleared of all electronic devices. I would imagine if a public school teacher tried that they'd get flack from parents and, as typically happens, if the administration didn't sanction the teacher, the school board ("That was for practice. Then he made school boards") would fire them.
ReplyDeleteYour education is and always has been in your own hands, though the schools at least tried in the past. My brother and I were discussing the number of small colleges that sprang up in New England and around the country once the G.I. Bill and other federal student aid programs started and how those started failing as Republicans started cutting those back. I remember a decade after one in New Hampshire closed, I got dragged to a bar in the former college town and how the bar had pennants with the dead college's name on it and now many of the patrons were former students - the kind of hangers on that colleges get. I wonder if they're still there and what will happen to the bar after the last of them dies off.
When they get to the final exam, which has to be done in a classroom (my college required that), they crash and burn. If you set your grading so the final significantly swings your grade, AI loses.
ReplyDeleteI expect that’s going to be the first response, anyway.