Allegedly? … They’ve been cooking the books for years about all sorts of things.

Well, now you’re asking a definitional question. What counts as “AI”? If I use OCR to help grade multiple choice tests, I’ve saved hours. That’s AI, isn’t it? What about spaced repetition for flashcards or dynamic question selection for quizzes? Do they count? … So then we’re back to the same old story. People want to sell weird fancy useless shit (that counts as AI), so you ask if AI has value, and then they reply by giving you more traditional examples (that also count as AI), and then the whole conversation leads nowhere.

Anyway, let’s focus it. Let’s go with ChatGPT as a generative tool. Then still there are some real gains that can be made. Small but real.

• If I’m brainstorming ideas for a lesson plan and use ChatGPT to come up with 10 ideas that I use for inspiration, maybe that’s OK.
• If I need a graphic to illustrate some concept to the students and I use genAI to create it, could be useful.
• We can come up with dozens of things just like this. Teachers using generative AI in small ways for specific tasks to speed up their workflow.

Well obviously. AI is a bubble, which is mostly vaporware. The point was always to sell it, and what better place than a school? The administration will force it on the teachers and students, and that’s that.

The technology itself is simply irrelevant. All you need to know is that it’s a bubble and the purchasers don’t care what the users think, and then failure is guaranteed.

So the the test of capitalism is whether any of the executives who pushed the AI roll out have gotten fired or had their bonuses slashed… My guess is none of them.

If this were actually about competition, then people would be punished for not paying attention to all of the naysayers who predicted this exact phenomenon. If accountability were a key feature, then corporations would have set up their bonus structure to look for 5-year or 10-year benefits from the AI push because of this exact issue.

Of course we haven’t seen that anywhere because AI was and always is a bubble and everybody knew it and the only goal was short-term profits for whoever can claw them out of the employees or the minor shareholders fingers.

No… It will mark the end of some of them in Chrome. Not in general.

What actually happens is that some people move away from Chrome, because ads suck.

Not hidden. Sitting there openly. That is always true for bubbles.

“our”? Screw you too.

Oh, there’s pretty solid data about Australia. A large percent of kids are still using social media because the ones who no longer use it are the ones whose parents won’t let them use it, which is of course the same group as the ones whose parents always had that power. But we have heard from some vulnerable minority kids who now no longer get access to the support that they used to have. And that’s really f***** up.