I suggest please link directly to the reddit thread, it has the original text (not a snippet) and lots of additional insights and anecdotes in the comments.
On HN, reddit counts as a negative signal. You link to reddit directly and most HNers will instantly downvote.
I keep telling people here that reddit is actually an underappreciated goldmine, but I guess feeling better than others feels too good to pass on.
In my mind, reddit is like of HN, except instead of being just tech and business oriented people, it's every subject under the sun. Most of it is garbage (like on HN) but if you're willing to search it's a goldmine.
Teachers using AI to generate all of their lesson material, read student papers and write comments.
Students using AI to generate their papers and solve complex problems.
What are we as humans even doing. Why not just connect two shitty models together and tell them to hallucinate to each other and skip the whole need to think about anything. We can fire both teachers and students at the same time and save money on this whole education thing.
> * A teacher sponsoring a club put student artwork through Microsoft Copilot to 'clean it up' because he thought it looked too unfinished and the kid felt incredibly disrespected and upset.
and rightly so! kids deserve better, that is awful
So my daughter got sent home with some math questions. Thought they looked a bit dry but thought nothing further of it. I checked the answers for her which were all ok.
Couple of days later she comes home and tells me I was wrong about some of them which I know I was not. Apparently they self marked them as the teacher read the answers out. Decided to phone in and ask about the marking scheme which I was told I was wrong too and basically I should have done better at GCSE mathematics.
I relayed my mathematical credentials and immediately the tone changed. The discussion indicated that they’d generated the questions with CoPilot and then fed that back into CoPilot and generated the answer sheet which had two incorrect answers on it.
The teacher and department head in question defended their position until I threatened to feed them to the examination board and leadership team. The following of the tech was almost zealot level religious thinking which is not something I want to see in education.
I check all homework now carefully and there have been other issues since.
That is crazy. Curious - are you planning on raising to the board, administrators, etc? It's probably impacting other students (who don't have a parent checking their work), and teachers of other subjects in the school may be doing the same thing
Wonder if this is a natural consequence of teachers being overworked. If teachers can get more work done with AI (who cares if quality suffers!) then that becomes the baseline and admins will push them to do even more.
In other words I predict this to be less of an issue with smaller class sizes.
In my experience teachers are overworked because they care if quality suffers. They can get their work done in the set time if they just don't care for the students as much.
(Very anecdotal, local-to-the-Netherlands experience, of course.)
Trains allowed us to go further than we could ever walk. Cars caused us to lose the ability to walk completely.
Looms allowed us to produce fabrics of higher quality than we ever could by hand. Fast fashion caused us to lose the ability to care for and mend clothes completely.
Computers allowed us to calculate and "think" faster than we ever could before. AI caused us to lose the ability to think completely...
Richard Feynman summed up public education well even if schools have ostensibly changed since: "Everything was written by somebody who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always!".
In the future, only prestigious private schools will employ human teachers.
Education in public schools is going to be 100% LLMs with text-to-speech, the only human adult in classrooms will be a security guard, but later they will also be replaced with AI-controlled autocannons that shoot non-lethal projectiles to discipline misbehaving kids.
Nah, kids would have to wear armbands with tasers on them, required to put them on to enter the school building or open doors in the building. Their only human adult interaction will be with the guards that ensure they are banded up and who stay on campus to react to alarms from every kid who tries to remove their armbands.
Buses will be driven by AI as well, so they'll only see their parents for 10 minutes in the morning and for an hour or so during the occasional dinners they eat together, and otherwise kids will be entirely alienated and left alone.
But do not worry! There will be an AI companion for them to talk to at all hours, a nanny AI, or a nAInny, one that starts as a nanny when they are infants and will gradually grow into an educator, confidante, and true friend that will never betray them.
That nAInny will network with other nAInnies to find mates for their charges, coordinate dates, ensure that no hanky-panky goes on until they graduate college and get married, and will be there together to give pointers and instructions during the act of coitus to enhance the likelihood of producing offspring that their fellow nAInnys will get to take care of.
A truly symbiotic relationship where the humans involved never have any agency but never need it as their lives are happy and perfect in every way.
If you don't want to participate in that, you will be removed as an obstacle to the true happiness of the human race.
All those teachers should indeed be banned from using AI. But that's not because LLMs are incapable of the things they're using them for, in a way that would be an improvement over how those same teachers were doing those tasks pre-LLMs.
The majority of times I see things like this it turns out that it's either:
- The "they've built it wrong" case; this one is the most common. People using - or in this case being made to use at work - tools that behind the scenes all use very cheap models (e.g. 4o-mini) with little context, half vibe-coded up, to save costs. The company making "MagicSchool" doesn't care, they want to maximize those profit margins and they're selling to school administration, not teachers, who only look at the costs and don't ever actually use the products themselves. Just like classic enterprise software in traditional companies. They need to tick boxes, show features that only show the happy path/case. It is perfectly possible to make it high quality, in a way that adds value, doesn't make shit up, and is properly validated. But especially in this niche, sales trumps everything. The hope is that at some point, this will change. We've seen the same play out with enterprise software to an extent; new such software does tend to be more usable on average than it used to be. It has taken a long time to get there though.
- The "you're holding it wrong" meme; users themselves directly using tools like Microsoft Copilot, 4o and friends (very outdated, free tiers, miles behind Claude/Gemini 2.5 pro/o3/etc.), along with having zero idea about what LLMs can and can't do, and obviously even less of an idea about inherent biases and prompting to prevent those. This combined with a complete lack of caring, along with a lack of competency - people lacking the basic critical thinking skills necessary to spot issues - is a deadly combo.
Of the problems with tasks and outcomes named in that thread, the large majority can indeed be done already with LLMs in a manner that both saves time and provides better quality than the level of those teachers rightly being criticized there. Teachers who are not even checking the output obviously don't give a single damn anyway, and that tells you enough about what the quality of their teaching would've been like pre-LLMs.
The cracks in the education system were showing even before AI, with unmotivated students and teachers alike just burning their hours. AI just exposed these cracks and showed that the entire system is incredibly inefficient and pointless. I believe that the future of education is in much smaller institutions that can support their communities on a human scale.
In some cases teachers are being overworked and expected to deliver far beyond their capability. The issue I see here is that its Powerpoint / document generation AI tools often use older / cheaper / worse models e.g. 4o mini, instead of Claude opus or Gemini 2.5 pro. The second issue it is often hard for the original prompter to see issues in AI output, so another pair of eyes or a different LLM prompt with more context can often pick up most issues. I dont think AI use for teachers is going anywhere, we should work with the flow on this one and help teachers do their jobs more easily.
This is happening across all industries, unfortunately. Medical, engineering, pharmaceuticals, law enforcement, military, transportation, law... Thanks for a perfect post that describes the problem! We need more of these. Most people know they're doing it too, they just need to be told more.
These examples show that we have a serious social issue, and it's not limited to teachers. People misuse LLMs. We engineers understand that LLMs are products under development. They only work correctly under certain circumstances, and they have limitations and non-perfect evaluation metrics. Regular people (non-engineers) treat them as finished products or magic wands. They ignore the warnings in the page saying LLM can make mistakes. And there are billions of those people. This may create huge social problems that engineers can't fix.
Otherwise, yes, I am very concerned about society's use of LLMs -- particularly young people (students).
But now the very teachers themselves... Frankly, not surprised.
I've been using it to make me a much better tutor/mentor. But the cases outlined in (I'm assuming) the public education sector are very, very worrisome.
I think its more capitalism problems. The constant squeeze for everyone to output more for less pay or die of starvation. No one could ever choose good in these circumstances.
It is hilarious though that humans are just ready to slurp up any opportunity to just start shitting all over their work and their coworkers and students. Less time spent and caring?! yes please! then they become full time salesmen of it to everyone else, and then the social interaction problems just explode. Tribal standoffs, create entirely new tribes, plotting and deception to continue getting what they have a taste of.
Infighting distractions are so convenient as the government guts everything they work under
Often the LLM people read like they're five years old, discovering for the very first time what happens when you start to act out against society and root your moral calculus in deep cynicism
It feels funny to think about this next to the outrage over trans kids in school sports. There are probably a dozen kids nationally participating in a sport with other kids who didn't share the same set of chromosomes at birth. That's a tiny slice of the population, but the issue has captured the attention of a huge group of people. I believe the anger, if you distill it a bit, comes from an "unlevel" playing field, right?
But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade. I would wager that the number of students and teachers using AI is now the majority population.
I face this dilemma on a daily basis when trying to do my job as a software developer. Let claude take over, and risk losing the only skill I had to differentiate myself in this harsh world? Or, take a chance on being the turtle and trying to win the race against the hare?
> Let claude take over, and risk losing the only skill I had to differentiate myself in this harsh world?
the good times are over, it happens. i remember watching that Dall-E come out and feeling sorry for graphic designers, gloating in the knowledge programming was too complex to automate. then they automated it.
a human is still required in the loop for vibe coding, as its fairly fuckin useless without guidance, but i can see that changing too
The more time I spend writing code with help from LLMs the less I fear for my job, because I gain an increased understanding of how much depth there is to building software.
To get good results out of an LLM you need to determine exactly what the system needs to do and how it should work.
That's programming! We just don't have to type all the semicolons ourselves any more.
I’m drafting policy at work with teammates about how we will handle pull requests with aggressive use of Claude Code. We are currently researching and piloting it.
I am going to propose that no one should feel pressure to use any of the generative coding tools if they don't want to.
> I believe the anger, if you distill it a bit, comes from an "unlevel" playing field, right?
Why is "unlevel" in quotes? When it comes to physical activities, biological males have a huge advantage over biological females; high school boys routinely beat professional adult women's sport teams.
> But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade.
I agree that this is a bigger problem than trans kids in sports. I think people are less upset about this because
1. It's a more recent development
2. They think that the kids using AI are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage, albeit one that will only become apparent after they graduate.
People need to realize that the next generation of kids is already unable to differentiate human vs llm generated text, and not only that, but they don't even mind it. They are already using LLMs to generate all their text and so they don't mind reading LLM generated text either.
They won't be reading the text, they will be getting their LLMs to summarize the LLM generated text and read it to them. We are heading for a state where all written communication will be mediated by LLMs - get my people to talk to your people but for everyone.
LLMs will mediate plenty of routine text, but the choke-point shifts from “writing” to “prompting + validating”.
In client projects we see two hard costs pop up:
1. Human review time ⟶ still 2–4 min per 1 k tokens because hallucination isn’t solved.
2. Inference \$: for a 70 B model at 16 k context you pay ~\$0.12 per 1 k tokens — cheap for generation, expensive for bulk reading.
So yes, AI will read for us, but whoever owns the *attention budget + validation loop* still controls comprehension. That’s where new leverage lives.
54 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 74.5 ms ] threadTeachers use chatbots for everything else, uncritically. Not good!
https://np.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1mhntjh/unpopular_...
I keep telling people here that reddit is actually an underappreciated goldmine, but I guess feeling better than others feels too good to pass on.
In my mind, reddit is like of HN, except instead of being just tech and business oriented people, it's every subject under the sun. Most of it is garbage (like on HN) but if you're willing to search it's a goldmine.
Students using AI to generate their papers and solve complex problems.
What are we as humans even doing. Why not just connect two shitty models together and tell them to hallucinate to each other and skip the whole need to think about anything. We can fire both teachers and students at the same time and save money on this whole education thing.
and rightly so! kids deserve better, that is awful
Couple of days later she comes home and tells me I was wrong about some of them which I know I was not. Apparently they self marked them as the teacher read the answers out. Decided to phone in and ask about the marking scheme which I was told I was wrong too and basically I should have done better at GCSE mathematics.
I relayed my mathematical credentials and immediately the tone changed. The discussion indicated that they’d generated the questions with CoPilot and then fed that back into CoPilot and generated the answer sheet which had two incorrect answers on it.
The teacher and department head in question defended their position until I threatened to feed them to the examination board and leadership team. The following of the tech was almost zealot level religious thinking which is not something I want to see in education.
I check all homework now carefully and there have been other issues since.
In other words I predict this to be less of an issue with smaller class sizes.
(Very anecdotal, local-to-the-Netherlands experience, of course.)
Looms allowed us to produce fabrics of higher quality than we ever could by hand. Fast fashion caused us to lose the ability to care for and mend clothes completely.
Computers allowed us to calculate and "think" faster than we ever could before. AI caused us to lose the ability to think completely...
Now they just have an extra tool to help them.
Education in public schools is going to be 100% LLMs with text-to-speech, the only human adult in classrooms will be a security guard, but later they will also be replaced with AI-controlled autocannons that shoot non-lethal projectiles to discipline misbehaving kids.
Buses will be driven by AI as well, so they'll only see their parents for 10 minutes in the morning and for an hour or so during the occasional dinners they eat together, and otherwise kids will be entirely alienated and left alone.
But do not worry! There will be an AI companion for them to talk to at all hours, a nanny AI, or a nAInny, one that starts as a nanny when they are infants and will gradually grow into an educator, confidante, and true friend that will never betray them.
That nAInny will network with other nAInnies to find mates for their charges, coordinate dates, ensure that no hanky-panky goes on until they graduate college and get married, and will be there together to give pointers and instructions during the act of coitus to enhance the likelihood of producing offspring that their fellow nAInnys will get to take care of.
A truly symbiotic relationship where the humans involved never have any agency but never need it as their lives are happy and perfect in every way.
If you don't want to participate in that, you will be removed as an obstacle to the true happiness of the human race.
That's what's called GAN - generative adversarial network.
The majority of times I see things like this it turns out that it's either:
- The "they've built it wrong" case; this one is the most common. People using - or in this case being made to use at work - tools that behind the scenes all use very cheap models (e.g. 4o-mini) with little context, half vibe-coded up, to save costs. The company making "MagicSchool" doesn't care, they want to maximize those profit margins and they're selling to school administration, not teachers, who only look at the costs and don't ever actually use the products themselves. Just like classic enterprise software in traditional companies. They need to tick boxes, show features that only show the happy path/case. It is perfectly possible to make it high quality, in a way that adds value, doesn't make shit up, and is properly validated. But especially in this niche, sales trumps everything. The hope is that at some point, this will change. We've seen the same play out with enterprise software to an extent; new such software does tend to be more usable on average than it used to be. It has taken a long time to get there though.
- The "you're holding it wrong" meme; users themselves directly using tools like Microsoft Copilot, 4o and friends (very outdated, free tiers, miles behind Claude/Gemini 2.5 pro/o3/etc.), along with having zero idea about what LLMs can and can't do, and obviously even less of an idea about inherent biases and prompting to prevent those. This combined with a complete lack of caring, along with a lack of competency - people lacking the basic critical thinking skills necessary to spot issues - is a deadly combo.
Of the problems with tasks and outcomes named in that thread, the large majority can indeed be done already with LLMs in a manner that both saves time and provides better quality than the level of those teachers rightly being criticized there. Teachers who are not even checking the output obviously don't give a single damn anyway, and that tells you enough about what the quality of their teaching would've been like pre-LLMs.
Learning is hard, it's a struggle. Why learn when you can not learn?
Well I guess as long as you have an idea which model your teacher uses you are golden.
Sounds similar to social media.
Otherwise, yes, I am very concerned about society's use of LLMs -- particularly young people (students).
But now the very teachers themselves... Frankly, not surprised.
I've been using it to make me a much better tutor/mentor. But the cases outlined in (I'm assuming) the public education sector are very, very worrisome.
It is hilarious though that humans are just ready to slurp up any opportunity to just start shitting all over their work and their coworkers and students. Less time spent and caring?! yes please! then they become full time salesmen of it to everyone else, and then the social interaction problems just explode. Tribal standoffs, create entirely new tribes, plotting and deception to continue getting what they have a taste of.
Infighting distractions are so convenient as the government guts everything they work under
But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade. I would wager that the number of students and teachers using AI is now the majority population.
I face this dilemma on a daily basis when trying to do my job as a software developer. Let claude take over, and risk losing the only skill I had to differentiate myself in this harsh world? Or, take a chance on being the turtle and trying to win the race against the hare?
the good times are over, it happens. i remember watching that Dall-E come out and feeling sorry for graphic designers, gloating in the knowledge programming was too complex to automate. then they automated it.
a human is still required in the loop for vibe coding, as its fairly fuckin useless without guidance, but i can see that changing too
To get good results out of an LLM you need to determine exactly what the system needs to do and how it should work.
That's programming! We just don't have to type all the semicolons ourselves any more.
I am going to propose that no one should feel pressure to use any of the generative coding tools if they don't want to.
Why is "unlevel" in quotes? When it comes to physical activities, biological males have a huge advantage over biological females; high school boys routinely beat professional adult women's sport teams.
> But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade.
I agree that this is a bigger problem than trans kids in sports. I think people are less upset about this because
1. It's a more recent development 2. They think that the kids using AI are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage, albeit one that will only become apparent after they graduate.
In client projects we see two hard costs pop up: 1. Human review time ⟶ still 2–4 min per 1 k tokens because hallucination isn’t solved. 2. Inference \$: for a 70 B model at 16 k context you pay ~\$0.12 per 1 k tokens — cheap for generation, expensive for bulk reading.
So yes, AI will read for us, but whoever owns the *attention budget + validation loop* still controls comprehension. That’s where new leverage lives.
second order effect: across the entire population, the incentive to learn anything at all is removed
third order effect: society ceases to improve and regresses
but it's all good as I can generate boilerplate 30% faster!