from Hacker News

Conversational AI is a great tool for education

by vishnuharidas on 11/25/23, 9:06 PM with 31 comments

• by makach on 11/25/23, 10:15 PM

  I completely agree. The power of LLM and conversational AI will give each student their own private tutor, ofc. there are issues today, but the future will be wonderful for whoever is able to embrace this technology.

  I already used GPT to help me tutor my kids, and for my kids to use it when they get stuck. They get unstuck faster. They are critical but also more willing to accept response as fact, we discuss this regularly and they seem to be getting the point.

  so many kids get left behind because a teacher is unable to spend time with them, how amazing will it not be for each student to have their own supporting teacher?

  hopefully, we will be able to harness AI for the better and good.

• by sugiero on 11/25/23, 10:46 PM

  Breathless anecdata like this always talk about self education.

  The op is saying “I learned <TECHNICAL_JARGON>” but did they? How are they quantifying learning? How do they know what they “learned” is even correct.

  I agree with the headline but I think it needs a qualifier of “in the presence of an educator”. The educator, can be a technical text, is there to sanity check the conversational agent.

  In my experience the best use of such agents at this time is in a domain where I’m already an expert and I want it to do some remedial work or lookups for me.

• by smoldesu on 11/25/23, 9:26 PM

  Wouldn't you be afraid that the AI is wrong? I've seen AI explain some things well, but I've also seen it manufacture completely fake concepts to fill in the blank. Maybe textbooks aren't perfect either, but at least they're written by accountable parties and read hundreds of times before published.

• by ren_engineer on 11/25/23, 10:21 PM

  obviously need some work to reduce/eliminate hallucination but LLMs will definitely transform learning. At worst you'll occasionally need to text search your notebook to confirm certain facts. Stuff like RAG and fine-tuning is already being done to improve those issues and I assume improvements will be made at the model level eventually

  When combined with the ability to run code and read images I think it will really help with learning math. Show it your work, have it tell you why you got a wrong answer, and then it can tell you the concepts you need to review

• by arikrak on 11/25/23, 11:24 PM

  This is certainly true and there will be many ways to improve on the default chatGPT experience to provide a full tutor / educational experience. Wonder who's working in this space (besides Khanmigo)?

• by mattkantor on 11/25/23, 11:00 PM

  I just generated a reading comprehension story about 2 pokemon characters along with multiple-choice questions. This is pretty amazing for helping my kind WANT to read something.

• by leobg on 11/25/23, 11:34 PM

  I had a lot of fun, having ChatGPT generate a fake diary of, say, Adolf Hitler for certain dates in history, as well as time machining him into the present. I just like being able to pick up a piece of history and turn it around and look at it from different sides.

  The big disclaimer is that you can really only do that with subjects that you already know very well. Then again, precisely that can be part of the fun. Because it is fun to see where the model gets it right, vs where some details are in conflict with something you know from other sources.