Alpha School, a pricey private school with campuses nationwide, uses artificial intelligence to instruct students. AI schools have been praised by the Trump administration, but researchers say there's limited evidence the model works.
  • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.onlineEnglish
    17·
    8 小时前

    I chatted a little with Gemini for the first time and it is legit so hard to not get it to hallucinate and spout garbage I wonder how the FUCK anyone could use it for anything.

    • Rooster326@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      35 分钟前

      Those people are paying $55,000/year for attendance.

      They will never work a day in their life with parents that rich.

  • quick_snail@feddit.nlEnglish
    29·
    11 小时前

    That is, by definition, not a school.

    Schools teach information.

    This is a hallucination mill.

    • Bazell@lemmy.zipEnglish
      21·
      10 小时前

      I hope that, at least, AI there will be using RAG system and some real information sources. Otherwise, as you have mentioned, it would be a hell of education.

        • Crozekiel@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          9 小时前

          It’s a chat bot that googles your question before answering in the hopes to cut down on hallucinations. It doesn’t solve this problem at all.

          • Bazell@lemmy.zipEnglish
            11·
            8 小时前

            Your explanation is not completely correct. More correct explanation would be: an AI chatbot that has an ability to gather relatable info to the user input from internal or external sources allowing the AI model to answer more precisely on questions even if the model wasn’t trained on this data at all. This lowers the amount and degree of hallucinations to some point but doesn’t eliminate them.

        • Bazell@lemmy.zipEnglish
          21·
          8 小时前

          A separate subsystem for an AI chatbot that allows it to get related to the user input information from text files(database) without scanning it all each time or having as an input to the promt, thus reducing hallucinations since instead of telling you something “from the head” it has an input in the form like this: user_input+info_content+memory.

          Despite RAG being really helpful in many ways it doesn’t eliminate hallucinations completely. Only lowers them to some point.

        • selfAwareCoder@programming.devEnglish
          21·
          9 小时前

          I don’t think it will make enough difference, but RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation.

          There’s a few ways to do it, but basically it’s a way add extra information to the conversation. By default the model only knows what it generates, plus what is in the conversation. RAG adds extra information to the mix.

          The simplest approach is to scan the conversation for keywords and add information based on them.

          So you ask “what is the capital of France” and instead of the model answering/hallucinating by itself, your app could send the full Wikipedia page for France along with your question, and the model will almost always return the correct answer from the Wikipedia page and hallucinate much less. In practice it gets a lot more complicated and I’m not up to date on recent RAG but the idea is the same.

  • Manjushri@piefed.socialEnglish
    9·
    9 小时前

    Alpha Schools, opening this fall in the former GEMS Academy in Lakeshore East, says its AI-driven model can help students learn core academics in just two hours a day, freeing up time for workshops, unique projects and learning various life skills.

    Well that is a little hard to believe. I have a feeling that these kids will be woefully unprepared for college…

    The school will serve 100 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, with plans to expand in the future

    Oh my. I’m sorry, these kids will be woefully unprepared for high school. They will crash and burn when they get dumped into a totally different learning environment with kids whose parents can’t afford $55,00 per year for elementary school tuition.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      7 小时前

      They will crash and burn when they get dumped into a totally different learning environment with kids whose parents can’t afford $55,00 per year for elementary school tuition.

      I’ve seen this happen a billion times with private school kids. Private schools suck at teaching math. It just doesn’t happen. Those kids drown in Algebra 1.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      30·
      19 小时前

      I’ve helped picked up the pieces after similar “educations” and it’s bad. Teaching adults how to carry in addition or the concept of a variable. High school students that don’t have their times tables.

      Education is a fundamental human right. The Right has been working to strip it in the US since Brown v Board of Ed.

      • tmyakal@infosec.pubEnglish
        6·
        12 小时前

        My partner is finally going to college after graduating high school twenty years ago. They were the only one in a college composition class that knew what a thesis statement was.

        • Angrydeuce@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          10 小时前

          I was in the same boat myself about 15 years ago, and it was bad even then, I cant even imagine how it is now.

          You know how we used to have to memorize phone numbers but then smartphones came around and now nobody can recall more than a handful from memory? I’m no better, I can recall my wife’s, moms, dads, and work, but I couldn’t tell you any other relevant number to save my life today.

          Now take that paradigm and apply it to general thought. What happens when all our thinking gets reduced to queries and does not grow beyond that?

  • nonentity@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    12·
    19 小时前

    A healthy and broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.

    They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      14 小时前

      An argument could be made that the safety we’ve enjoyed has allowed stupid people to act like destructive assholes without fear of consequences. Things like being anti-vax, pro-theocratic, and anti-education come to mind.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      11 小时前

      Traditionally, these pilot programs operate as a marketing program rather than an educational program.

      You’re going to see a class of students enter the system with enormous supplemental aid and resources. The AI will be included but largely incidental. The students will be cherry-picked for media optics, rather than randomly selected from within the school district. Tons of paid professionals will write long-winded hagiographies about the affordability and effectiveness of the program. Some Ivy League University or Fortune 500 business will make a big show of admitting the most charismatic and saleable student graduates.

      Then the program will be rolled out to the rest of the country as quickly and sloppily as possible. AI will be jammed down people’s throats. You’ll get an earful about stupid idiot parents hysterically complaining about their dumb baby children, because they’re afraid of The Terminator movies. This will be book-ended with Steven Pinker and Bill Gates calmly explaining how AI turns dumbies into geniuses. A string of movies and TV shows will be released about kids getting AI education and becoming too smart (and time traveling or getting magic powers or some other silly bullshit).

      The YIMBY coalition of very informed TV nerds will be assembled to scream at anyone who doesn’t like AI. If you don’t like AI you’re Ableist or a Bigot or Not Serious About Education. Meanwhile, we’ll get an earful about how certain migrants and POCs are incapable of learning from AI because of their inferior genes. School districts will be told to either adopt AI or lose their funding / get taken over by the state / federal agencies. National media will be saturated with “AI is normal” media content until people stop resisting.

      And all of this will culminate in more school privatization, more public education defunding, and more militant policing of young people. Because that’s always been the real end goal.