Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

saadn92

I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.

glitchc

A calculator, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.

boringg

Sounds like they didn't really have good tutors at the company.

radiorental

This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work. Students need to understand what AI is and is not. Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next. While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck. The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy. Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

colinrand

There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect. It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable. If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?

contubernio

This would be good advice except that students are no better at getting information from AI than they are from getting it from books, botes, or professors. If you know what to ask, AI will give a lot, but if you don't ...

upupupandaway

A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer. Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes. Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now. I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school. [1] - https://alpha.school/ Edit: It's 40k a year.

ivansavz

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/W15Hg

vatsachak

Learning from an LLM is nearly impossible because it has no opinions on how to structure the content. It's great at giving you the illusion that you're learning though. If you know an outline of the material and want to structure it your own way (ex, explain attention to me using Haskell notation) it's really great. But otherwise, human notes win.

brandav

I'd compare tutors to personal trainers. They're not doing anything special other than making sure you're using the equipment properly and providing accountability so you don't lose motivation and give up.

sjducb

I’m learning French and I’ve tried both AI and a remote tutor from Cameroon. The tutor from Cameroon is much better. She tells me when I’m getting the basics wrong and designs lessons to go back and fix the basics. AI loves to tell me how great I am and do lessons at the frontier of what I understand to make me feel good about how much progress I’m making.

adamddev1

I just tried ChatGPT on a simple find an error in the proof question today and it completely butchered it ignoring the main constraint that two variables a and b were natural numbers. It said, "a and b might not be natural numbers" and then went on to produce a very elaborate, completely wrong answer.

djtriptych

I've begun to wonder what our obligation is as the last generation of humans to educate ourselves and grow up without AI.

keithnz

I've been using chatgpt to tutor my son to improve his writing skills. It actually works quite well and the lessons adapt to his skill level. I seeded it with the curriculum and marking guidelines for his school year. Each lesson is timeboxed to 30 minutes and he stops if the lesson goes over time. I then feed this back into chatgpt and it adapts the lessons appropriately. It's helped quite a bit with a definite improvement in his writing skills. He actually wants to do this instead of school as he feels he gets a lot more out of it!

mullingitover

Tutoring is another situation where it can succeed wildly or fail miserably, and it will depend more on the harness than the model. Tutoring is a process, and the end result is that the student gains a demonstrable new capability. The how isn't as important as the end result. If we end up with a bunch of people with increased personal capabilities, it's a win. If we're lazy and we end up with a bunch of people leaning on crutches, we failed. Time will tell, I guess. Could be a surprise answer to Bloom's 2 sigma problem or a very stunted generation, or a mix of both.

AlienRobot

>'Sure AI won't perform as well as our human tutors with all the support behind them, but it's also $30 a month.' For how long, though. >Mr Buckland also claimed the tutoring industry doesn't 'actually do anything unique' but instead provides comfort to students - something AI can replicate. Jesus. That's really not a good thing. It's not every day you see someone so incredibly dismissive of the product they're selling themselves.

fwlr

Regardless of how many reasons you can come up with for real tutors being better than AI tutors, it’s clear that real tutors can’t survive in a market that also has AI. In other industries the accepted ritual for this situation is to genuflect at the Altar of the Invisible Hand and repeat the phrase “Actually, The More Economically Competitive Option Is Better”. (It is understandably harder to swallow this platitude when the industry happens to be “your children’s future”.)

autoexec

> Failed Tutoring Company Shuts Down, Tells Parents 'use AI instead' Ah, now that makes sense.

steve_taylor

It depends on why the tutor is hired. If the student is easily distracted, the presence of a human tutor will prevent them doom-scrolling brainrot videos, whereas an AI tutor won't have that effect on them. I have an ASD level 2 son approaching year 11 and this is why I'll be hiring a human tutor next year.

__MatrixMan__

The way to use AI to learn is not to ask it for the answers. Read a book, make notes about how the things you learn in that book relate to other things you know. Describe those connections as if you were teaching the topic to an interested friend and ask an AI to critique the descriptions. That'll tell you which parts of your textbook to reread, or which other books to read. It'll also give you the confidence to teach the topic to an interested friend, if you have one. It has to be a second step, a critic. If it's the first step you don't end up with any way to know when it's being crazy.