This is a post I began writing last year, but several things got in the way: above all, paternity leave. But also my own increasing dismay at the ways

The leading AI models are now very good historians

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2025-01-22 23:30:02

This is a post I began writing last year, but several things got in the way: above all, paternity leave. But also my own increasing dismay at the ways that LLMs were being used by students in the classroom. Ask anyone you know in education: ChatGPT has been a disaster when it comes to facilitating student cheating and — perhaps even more troubling — contributing to a general malaise among undergraduates. It’s not just that students are submitting entirely AI-written assignments. They are also (I suspect) relying on AI-generated answers far more comprehensively, not just in their homework but in their daily lives. This has a kind of flattening effect. I’m not alone in noticing the increasingly sameness of student responses to course material. LLMs, which are exquisitely well-tuned machines for finding the median viewpoint on a given issue, are surely contributing to it.

In other words, it’s clear that we will have a turbulent period of change as we figure out how to fit these new capabilities into our existing structures of education. For that reason, I’m not quite as optimistic about how this will go as I was when I wrote this back in fall of 2023: