It’s an ongoing debate I have with one of my students. He says English/language teachers specifically will have a hard time finding work in about 2-5 years. I disagree, especially for students who want a more conversational approach and can afford the classes.
What do y’all think?
Considering you can't even ask genAI to summarize a page without it falling for prompt injection, what makes me think it could replace a teacher of any subject?
There is no substitute for proper learning and genAI is not even close to a substitute for bad learning, IMO. Best I could get is a massively hallucinated mess that will probably end up causing kids to grow up not actually knowing what 2+2 is because every other week the genAI model changes the answer to another random integer.
I have zero concern for humans teaching as it stands.
👏 Thank you! I love the comparison of AI as hallucinating robots. It’s wildly inaccurate and has shown to be dangerous at times.
Teachers have agency to implement an agenda. An AI simply States "what do you want to learn". It doesn't know and can't know. It doesn't have a will agency to do anything. It doesn't prepare mentally to accomplish something. Its simply book 2.0.
Good point. It still takes student engagement to prompt, but easier to do in a classroom setting.
AI, sure. LLM? Fat chance.
Supplement, yes; replace, no. The teacher needs to assess and correct what the student is doing wrong as much as teach them how to do it right. This is not a good use case for AI. However, AI tools will be helpful in creating and grading course materials, especially ones that are interactive or customized to the individual student.
True. Teachers use it as a tool and so do students. An informed curriculum change would do most school systems good, but that’s a different issue.
AI can't even troubleshoot my freaking problems with accounts or anything. Why the hell would it think it has a chance of teaching anybody in a classroom?
Really? I would have thought that troubleshooting would be fairly straightforward, even for a LLM
For the lecturing portion of what a teacher does? Probably; YouTube's replaced/supplemented mediocre professors and tutors for a decade already on a number of subjects (e.g. math).
I hadn't considered using an LLM to practice my Japanese, but if it can spit out entire articles of mostly coherent language, it could probably serve as a practice conversational partner with reduced feelings of embarrassment for some people too. Doubt it'd be worse than the "split up into pairs (of non-native speakers trying to talk to each other despite insufficient vocabulary)" exercises that we had to do back when I was in school... Picking up an AI-nese accent would be a risk though, like learning too much of your Japanese from anime or your English from Hollywood movie trailers. (I didn't really understand that until I heard a guy on YT several years ago using the "In a world... where blah, blah, blah..." movie trailer cadence repeatedly as part of his plain old regular commentary. That was... enlightening.)
For the "babysitting" part of what teachers do? Probably not any time soon.
I have been playing Babadum for vocabulary, it has a Japanese option: https://babadum.com/play/?lang=9&game=1
Ha! I’d like to see AI try classroom management. That would go downhill quickly I surmise.
But, introverts would benefit as you say, as they do in virtual language classes. I hadn’t thought about the accent.
For learning new languages, LLMs often default to some specific level of formality that doesn't apply to all scenarios, so using it as an aid might be helpful but it can't wholly replace lessons.
This comes up with Japanese as well apparently. My partner sometimes uses ChatGPT to practice new languages, but it defaults to a more formal form than you'd probably use with friends. Not a huge issue, but just be aware you'll need something else if you want to properly learn and not just practice a little.
Yeah, that's what I mean by AI-nese. Formality in Japanese is great point.
Classes won't necessarily help you there as much as you'd like though. Even after 3+ years of them as a kid, I was told on a foreign exchange trip (where my host brother spoke much better English than my Japanese) that his family found it weird how formal I was, and I had to explain that my teachers literally had not taught me how to speak informally yet!
Don't get me started on how frustrating Japanese language curriculum is... I took 7 years of classes (starting in elementary school) and not a single teacher even mentioned the word 君 -- which is in damned near every pop song! (grumble grumble...) I had to learn that word from TVTropes rather than any of my textbooks because after 7 years of study, I still couldn't understand the variations of "you" that are actually used in a typical episode of anime. 🤦️
Can you imagine going through seven years of English classes and no one brings up the word "ma'am" even in passing? Or going through three years of classes without introducing contractions like "can't"?! (rant rant rant... 🙄️)
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