By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight. Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent “2hr Learning” model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah.
Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. “As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” according to Unbound’s charter school application in Arizona. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”
Spending less time on traditional curriculum frees up the rest of students’ days for life-skill workshops that cover “financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving,” according to the Arizona application.
As someone who is extremely hands on and learns basically nothing from lectures, this actually sounds like a decent idea if it is executed well, especially the Khan Academy integration. I’d rather just sit down and read a textbook and do practice problems and be graded on them than be stuck in a lecture for 7 hours only to have to relearn everything anyways because I lose track of what’s being said in like 5 seconds of the lecture starting.
Why the fuck are we so accepting of everybody trying to replace real people with AI. The answer is money, obviously, but holy shit.
To be fair, white collar workers have become so lazy and incompetent, most of their jobs would be done better by AI.
Charlie Kaufman had some good words to say about AI in screenwriting. Most movies released today could be written by AI and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
What a bullshit statement. I suppose we just let machinery take all the jobs of the blue collar workers too then?
I’m not convinced that’s the screenwriters’ fault. I think more likely its that the mainstream movie industry knows that pastiche crap is what is most profitable, so that’s all it funds.
Similar with pop music. Most stuff that gets made is garbage. But it doesn’t mean that amazing stuff isn’t being made, it’s just that you have to hunt for it.
Movies are worse because the resource and people requirements for a single movie are much more substantial than for a single album.
I’d say it’s both.
Not all writers are complacent with potboiling, but most of them are and it’s what makes them average.
lol those kids are fucked
Maybe. Let’s see how it pans out.
(they are)
Yes and no. It really depends on the model.
The newest Claude Sonnet I’d probably guess will come in above average compared to the humans available for a program like this in making learning fun and personally digestible for each student.
The newest Gemini models could literally cost kids their lives.
The gap between what the public is aware of (and even what many employees at labs, including the frontier ones) and the reality of just how far things have come in the last year is wild.
I can see how this might be true if an AI can respond to individual cues from a single kid, which a teacher can’t reliably do because they have to look after 30 kids at once.
I’m skeptical that those cue responses will be reasonable though. Maybe in the mean, but I reckon there’s gonna be some wild and potentially traumatic edge cases.
yeah but the white ones will be able to vote
This is some serious bullshit. I don’t have the time or energy to say more right now.
I can’t wait for the generation who believes that the War of 1812 was won by the French.
It’s already bad enough that many American believe that war was started by foreign invaders and that it ended in a resounding victory for the US.
Strategically, it was a long term victory for the US, but yeah, there’s a lot of misconceptions about it already.
Good song tho
And by “AI” they’ll just have the kids solve captchas for 2 hours.
“Which one of these pictures is Jesus?” with pictures of:
Bacon
Swastika
AR15
Trump
Damn it. Gonna have to be bacon, curse my carbon footprint
I don’t get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.
Charter schools, lol
Online charter schools are horrifying. There is no expectation that the teacher know or understand the material they are teaching your child. High school is basically working through an online work book by yourself. Teachers use AI to “look up” answers they don’t know yourself.
It’s hell.
But this doesn’t sound like that. This sounds like a model that is using external tools made by humans like Khan Academy to actually do the teaching and just uses the AI model to process how well the person doing the course is understanding it.
I would be willing to bet serious money that a kid in this program would get a better education than a homeschooler, Because exactly like your earlier point, the vast majority of homeschool parents that teach their kids are fucking morons and only have their kids homeschooled because they’re fucking morons.
I don’t think homeschooling should be the standard we set for education.
El oh fucking el. Can’t wait to see how AI handles a classroom of rowdy pre-pubescent teens
Drone strikes.
“Time for home economics! Today we learn to make pizza. Be sure to use plenty of glue on the dough so the cheese doesn’t slide off!”
Today we will learn how to make a pie:
Gather ingredients:
- Flour
- Eggs
- Water
- 10 pounds of dog shit
- 10 gallons of cat urine
Cooking Process:
- Step 1: Mix all ingredients and place in a pan
- Step 2: Add Gasoline
- Step 3: Bake at 9000° Celsius for 12 hours
- Step 4: ???
- Step 5: Profit?
Thank you for this delicious recipe! My great aunt used to make this all the time for our ritual house painting and it always brought joy to the children. Try adding cinnamon or thumbtacks to the pie for extra zing! God bless!!
This recipe is garbage… I didn’t have any eggs, so I used olive oil. I also didn’t have an oven, so I put it all in my freezer overnight. It tasted terrible, although my 2yo liked it. My MIL told my wife to divorce me. 0/5 stars
not quite on-topic, but I hate online recipe sites/comments too
How long until the AI starts trying to sext the children, that seems to be a common theme across every article I read about AI and chikdren after its been running for a few months.
As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content
This will be a nightmare for any neuro-divergent students, or really any student with atypical learning needs.
Atypical kids being left behind is a feature, not a bug. There’s a shocking amount of parents even in the year of our Lord 2024 who think we’re “too much” of a drain on schooling.
Theoretically, by analysing the exact needs, and being able to address them individually (in contrast to a teacher, who has limited time, and a whole class of students to attend to), it could do a better job. I mean the whole sales pitch of these systems is that they can attend to individual needs, and not just give you the material made for the average, “regular” student.
We’ll see if it turns out that way. I have my doubts. It needs to have training data about neuro-divergent students, and knowledge how to handle them. And usually AI reproduces bias and stereotypes. Edge-cases are more rare in the training data, and that makes AI less knowledgeable. And that happens a lot. Plus current AI is very limited. I’m not sure if it’s even smart enough to address individual needs. Or feed students with proper facts instead of fiction.
But I don’t think analysing the students behaviour is the issue here. If at all, it’s going to lead to improvements of those AI models, if they collect data about neuro-divergent people and feed them in.
Honestly the thing I’d be most worried about is that kids at that age are learning important social and language skills. Without an adult in the room to interact with, who are they going to learn that from?
Seriously. Teachers aren’t just some machines spewing out lessons. They are meant to be a trusted adult in a kids life. Someone they can learn social norms from and someone they can go to if they need an adult they can trust that isn’t their parents. I can foresee kids who go to this school having a much harder time getting away from abusive parents.
Yes, thank you. I feel like since the AI boom people have forgotten that the purpose of school isn’t just to teach kids to regurgitate facts
I feel like it’s even bigger than that. Since the AI boom it’s become increasingly clear that our society has completely devalued humanity as a social concept. Companies acting like it’s terrible to ever interact with another human. Schools acting like teaching is something to be automated. Dating apps trying to integrate AI to message people for you. Our society is going insane.
I think that dynamic predates AI, at least in it’s current form. As far as I know people have become separate and more anonymous and more alone for some time now. That got out of hand with technology in general. Videogames, surfing the web. Looking at phone screens all the time. And spending a lot of time on social media instead of in the real world.
Though we had people complaining even before that. I think I once read some very old text complaining about kids reading too much and spending their times in a fantasy world.
That doesn’t invalidate the current situation. A lot of that has indeed become problematic. And though there are AI therapists and teachers, I strongly suspect they’re going to make everything way worse than it already is.
the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues
That means every student is going to be recorded with a camera and microphone? Is anyone else horrified by the fact that the AI software is going to be actively watching and listening to these kids?
Or is it going to analyze typed responses only? (which is still creepy AF, btw)
Are we horrified? Yes but only briefly, and with not enough time to begin to process it before the next catastrophic idea.
I’m sure their privacy policy will heavily favor the students personal rights and that their backend database will be hackproof…
