"AI helps us to learn, it can serve as a tutor, it can be anything you want it to be, depending on the prompt you write," says Omorogbe Uyiosa, known as "Uyi" by his friends, a student from the Edo Boys High School, in Benin City, Nigeria. His school was one of the beneficiaries of a pilot that used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to support learning through an after-school program.
Personally, I don’t think the evidence has established an AI tutor is better than no tutor. Maybe for English, certainly not for Math, Science, History, Art, or any other subjects.
LLMs can be wrong - so can teachers, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the LLM is wrong more often.
Not really because humans are expensive and so only the rich can afford them. My kids get half an hour a week of music tutoring and it costs me time toeget them there plus the cost of the teacher. An ai could be at all practice times as well for when there is a teaching moment.
I could see a world where an AI teaches the mechanics of music, but is not relied on for evaluation of the students imagination in applying the mechanics.
When I was in art classes I wanted the class to teach me the techniques I did not know, but I was usually disappointed.
Like my life drawing classes would be me drawing images, and then getting judged on /what I already knew how to do/.
What I felt I would have benefited from was more along the lines of “here is three different shading techniques and how they can be used” or “here are three ways to use oil paints you’ve not used before.”
I always had ideas of images to create, what I could have benefited from was intros to more tools and ways to use those tools.
I could see an AI being able to do that for students of the arts.
“How does AI tutoring compare to human tutoring?” Thats the first question that came to my mind!
In the real world, it depends on if humans are available to do the tutoring. Even if human tutors are better than AI, AI is better than no tutor.
Personally, I don’t think the evidence has established an AI tutor is better than no tutor. Maybe for English, certainly not for Math, Science, History, Art, or any other subjects.
LLMs can be wrong - so can teachers, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the LLM is wrong more often.
This is true. I was just thinking in the case of the study, but /any/ help when needed is better than no help.
Not really because humans are expensive and so only the rich can afford them. My kids get half an hour a week of music tutoring and it costs me time toeget them there plus the cost of the teacher. An ai could be at all practice times as well for when there is a teaching moment.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re close to getting an AI music tutor. From a practical standpoint, a large language model can’t interpret music.
From an ethos standpoint, allowing AI to train a musician breaks my heart.
I could see a world where an AI teaches the mechanics of music, but is not relied on for evaluation of the students imagination in applying the mechanics.
When I was in art classes I wanted the class to teach me the techniques I did not know, but I was usually disappointed.
Like my life drawing classes would be me drawing images, and then getting judged on /what I already knew how to do/.
What I felt I would have benefited from was more along the lines of “here is three different shading techniques and how they can be used” or “here are three ways to use oil paints you’ve not used before.”
I always had ideas of images to create, what I could have benefited from was intros to more tools and ways to use those tools.
I could see an AI being able to do that for students of the arts.
That is a good - but different - point.
Though a large part of tutoring music is just “play that again” said in a way that the music is played again.