this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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This is as insane as all of my school teachers that insisted that I will not always carry a calculator. In the real world, this is insecure Luddism, and stupidity. No real employer is going to stop you from using AI, or a calculator for that matter. These are tools. Your calculator has a limited register size for computations. It truncates everything in real world math, so π is always wrong as are all of the other cosmological constants. All calculators fail at the real world in an absolute sense, but so do you. You are limited in the scope of a time constraint that prevents you from calculating π to extended precision. You are a flawed machine too, we all are. My mom is pretty good at spelling, but terrible at maps. My dad is good at taking action and doing some kind of task, but terrible at planning and abstractive thinking. AI is great for answering questions about information quickly. It is really good at collaborative writing where I heavily edit the output for the first ~1k tokens or write it myself, then I limit the model's output to one sentence and add or alter keywords. Within around 4k-5k tokens, I am only writing a few key phrases and the model is absolutely writing in my words and in my voice far faster than I can type out my thoughts. Of course this is me running models offline on my hardware using open source tools. I also ban several keyword tokens that take away any patterns one might recognize as AI generated. No, I never use it here unless I have a good reason, and will always tell you so because we are digital neighbors and I care about you. I do not care about your biases with disrespect, but I do care when people are wrong.
If someone turns in math work specifically about π precision that is wrong because they do not know the limitations on their calculator, the should absolutely fail. If I did not teach them that π is truncated in all computers, I have failed. AI exists. Get over it. This dichotomous thinking and tribalism is insanely stupid barbarous primitivism. If you think AI is the appropriate tool and turn in work that is wrong, either I have failed to explain how AI is only correct around 80% of the time and that is not acceptable, or the student has displayed their irrational logic skills. If I use the tool to half my time spent researching, can use it for individualized learning, and half the time I spend writing, while turning in excellent work and displaying advanced understanding, I am demonstrably top of my class. It is a tool, and only a tool. Those that react in some dichotomous repulsion to AI should be purged for exactly the same reason as anyone that uses the tool poorly or to cheat. Both are equally incompetent.
It's not Luddism to recognize that foundational knowledge is essential to effectively utilizing tools in every industry, and jumping ahead to just using the tool is not good for the individual or the group.
Your example is iconic. Do you think the average middle schoolers to college students that are using AI understand anything about self hosting, token limits, and optimizing things by banning keywords? Let alone how prone to just making shit up models are - because they were designed to! I STILL get enterprise chatgpt referencing scientific papers that don't exist. I wonder how many students are paying for premium models. Probably only the rich ones.
It is Luddism to simplify your scope to this dichotomy. The competence is irrelevant. If you have dumb students or anyone uses the tool poorly, measure them as such. The tool is useful to many of us. People are stupid and always have been and so must be biased individually. Prejudice that stupidity instead of standardizing it culturally. You bring everyone down to the common denominator as a result of projecting onto everyone. Assuming and politicizing this lowest common denominator as a standard is insane. It is like the cancer of No Child Left Behind has consumed the world. It is a tool. Use it poorly and get called stupid or pay the consequences. If you assume everyone is stupid (*outwardly by policy) you will live in a dystopian stupid world. This boils down to the fundamentals of democracy and the unalienable right of all citizens in a democracy to have autonomy, self determinism, and full access to information. A key aspect of this is your right to choose including the right to be wrong, and the right to error and pay the consequences. You are supporting a regression of democracy and return to authoritarian feudal society when you fail to support a new form of information and the fundamental right of citizens to choose and to error. You cannot exist in a democracy without absolute freedom of information. It is everyone else's job to objectively asses the truths of others for themselves. This is the critical high level scope at play that will impact the future far after we are all dead and forgotten. Our era will be remembered based upon this issue. You are deciding to create a dark age of neo feudalism that I wholly reject. I choose democracy. You have a right to believe whatever you would like. You have a right to be wrong as does everyone else. I have a right to all information and to judge for myself and I am not giving that away to anyone else for any reason because I do not give away my citizenship blindly to Luddism. I adapt to a new technological source of information and judge for myself. I expect you to do the same. If you try to take away my citizenship in a democracy, I will fight you. No one has a right to bowdlerize the information of another. You have every right to judge a person and their information based upon their individual merits.
I never said not to teach it. Construct a mandatory general computer literacy program. Cover privacy, security, recommendation algorithms, AI, etc. And restrict AI use in other classes until they are competent in both. College? High school?
Not once did I talk about banning it or restricting information. And ..... So much other irrelevant stuff.
It is relevant, you simply cannot handle the big picture of abstraction and your responsibility within that paradigm. No excuses.