This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good.
"Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all."
"Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement"
I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:
> Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.
Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.
Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.
That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.
It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output.
For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory capture (at least for K-12 in the USA)
It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.
I grew up with PC‘s starting with DOS 1.0. I built a career as a systems engineer, basically by being confronted with thousands of problems that took four hours to figure out because the Windows world was changing so fast there was no documentation to easily find your answer. Those same problems now take me five minutes to figure out by using AI, so I’m able to move onto the next challenge and learn the next thing. That’s one aspect that I think isn’t well recognized in the anti-AI mindset.
That fact, multiplied over 1000 different disciplines, is one of the ways that AI is going to bring amazing progress to our world.
All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:
"With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."
I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.
These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.
No, today institutions like Georgia Tech -- which has an endowment of just about the same as MIT in the nineties adjusted for inflation -- seem to function just about the same way as MIT did back then.
I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.
And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.
I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assignments are outputs, teachers are evaluators, peers are optional, and knowledge (or an MIT degree) is an optimizable commodity to be acquired or produced as efficiently as possible."
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
MIT makes all its money from research (and investing its endowment more successfully than most schools), not tuition, and the success in research comes from having such a high-achieving community of faculty and graduate students. They're pretty incentivized to keep the bar for academic achievement genuinely high.
To clarify, I am pro-university. I'm just saying that institutions do not always behave in ways that are purely for educational benefit, such as with legacy admissions or grade inflation. I don't think the blame falls solely on students for viewing university degrees as a necessary step for something else. I would sure bet admissions committees will use AI to screen applicants, if they aren't doing so already.
It's actually not em-dashes, they are en-dashes, which is either intentionally to deceive (e.g., swapped) or used incorrectly. Both of which are bad, it's up to everyone to decide on which is worse coming from MITality.
Spaced en dashes – like this – are a correct and accepted typographical choice. Whether to use spaced en dashes or (spaced or unspaced) em dashes is a matter of taste or local convention, and varies from one publication to another. Other than a typo or two where the space was left out on one side of a dash, the dashes in this linked document are just fine. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash_versus_em_dash
I do like that they're open to reconsidering the grading paradigm wholesale. I taught at a boot camp for a while and our highest-placed cohorts were the ones to whom we gave neither grades nor certificates. They plainly understood the game was between them and an eventual interviewer, not them and the school or instructor.
You can think what you like about MIT, but at least they're giving it some thought, however perfunctory it may seem. Many German universities prefer to try and ignore the issue and hope for the best.
No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.
That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.
Tell us more about how MIT giving AI some thought compares superiorly to 'many German universities', and please tell us more about which German universities and in which circumstances.
My statement was more of a dig at German universities than a compliment to MIT. I understand your criticism of this institution (which doesn't even exist in that form in Germany), but that doesn't mean I have to reflexively condemn everything from there.
I'm just ignorant to German universities. Honestly, the only thing I know of is not even University level German education, but just the concept of the German gymnasium system, and that was from when a exchange student visited my high school, in the 1990s!
in various organizational forms. At a Gymnasium, you can obtain a full Abitur (university entrance qualification), which qualifies you to study at
- Universities
- Universities of Applied Sciences
For studies at Universities of Applied Sciences, a Fachabitur (subject-specific university entrance qualification) is necessary, which can be obtained in various ways. Previously, diplomas were usually awarded there, an academic degree between a B.A. and M.A. Since the Bologna reforms, the system has been changed to B.A./M.A.
At Universities of Applied Sciences, studies are more practically oriented (with practical phases); however, the biggest difference is that you cannot pursue a doctorate there, which is only possible at a "proper" university.
Besides social informatics, I also teach academic writing, which is why the topic of AI is important to me, because it's not easy for teachers to deal with. But I also don't think the strategy of simply looking away is effective.
To be fair, the US education system has long been "cooked" due to policies implemented many decades ago now to sacrifice excellence, exceptionalism, and true merit for engineered social stability and ruling class profiteering and plunder.
AI is an opportunity to improve true education and learning on an individual and community level based on free association without the authoritarian and violent hand of government imposing lowest common denominator uniformity on everyone to produce uniform and manageable, profitable pseudo-citizen cogs.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about how LLMs are somehow going to cultivate a society of "creative people full of ideas" when increasingly the people who are using it the most are accepting the LLMs ideas without question.
This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good.
"Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all."
"Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement"
I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:
> Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.
Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.
Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.
That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.
It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output.
For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory capture (at least for K-12 in the USA)
It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.
I grew up with PC‘s starting with DOS 1.0. I built a career as a systems engineer, basically by being confronted with thousands of problems that took four hours to figure out because the Windows world was changing so fast there was no documentation to easily find your answer. Those same problems now take me five minutes to figure out by using AI, so I’m able to move onto the next challenge and learn the next thing. That’s one aspect that I think isn’t well recognized in the anti-AI mindset.
That fact, multiplied over 1000 different disciplines, is one of the ways that AI is going to bring amazing progress to our world.
I hope AI was used to generate those empty words. What a waste of human effort.
Human slopality
They have always dressed it up as concerned humanitarianism. They did it already with large donations in the past:
https://www.philanthropy.com/news/can-a-350-million-gift-cha...
All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:
"With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."
I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.
Makes me sick.
MIT is so very, very overcapitalized.
These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.
It sounds like you want a return to a time before a lot of the government research money coming to institutions like MIT was gutted.
No, today institutions like Georgia Tech -- which has an endowment of just about the same as MIT in the nineties adjusted for inflation -- seem to function just about the same way as MIT did back then.
I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.
And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.
> This is a bunch of fluff.
Accurate description.
“Boy, these guys are just [your typical Bill Lumberghs] with upper management written all over them.”
I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assignments are outputs, teachers are evaluators, peers are optional, and knowledge (or an MIT degree) is an optimizable commodity to be acquired or produced as efficiently as possible."
Ok, but did AI and LLMs make the cheating easier, faster, harder to detect? Whatabout the past doesn't change the problems now.
"My leg already had a cut on it. No need to worry about the new stab wound in my chest!"
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
MIT makes all its money from research (and investing its endowment more successfully than most schools), not tuition, and the success in research comes from having such a high-achieving community of faculty and graduate students. They're pretty incentivized to keep the bar for academic achievement genuinely high.
To clarify, I am pro-university. I'm just saying that institutions do not always behave in ways that are purely for educational benefit, such as with legacy admissions or grade inflation. I don't think the blame falls solely on students for viewing university degrees as a necessary step for something else. I would sure bet admissions committees will use AI to screen applicants, if they aren't doing so already.
"Be bold" by saying nothing of any interest. I have to agree that this is basically just fluff.
Anyone put it into pangram yet?
97% human-written
I guess prolific em-dashes is not considered a sign of LLM writing anymore.
It's actually not em-dashes, they are en-dashes, which is either intentionally to deceive (e.g., swapped) or used incorrectly. Both of which are bad, it's up to everyone to decide on which is worse coming from MITality.
Spaced en dashes – like this – are a correct and accepted typographical choice. Whether to use spaced en dashes or (spaced or unspaced) em dashes is a matter of taste or local convention, and varies from one publication to another. Other than a typo or two where the space was left out on one side of a dash, the dashes in this linked document are just fine. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash_versus_em_dash
I do like that they're open to reconsidering the grading paradigm wholesale. I taught at a boot camp for a while and our highest-placed cohorts were the ones to whom we gave neither grades nor certificates. They plainly understood the game was between them and an eventual interviewer, not them and the school or instructor.
You can think what you like about MIT, but at least they're giving it some thought, however perfunctory it may seem. Many German universities prefer to try and ignore the issue and hope for the best.
I mostly think about what they did to Aaron Swartz.
Regarding Swartz, I agree, but those are two different things. My statement was also more about the avoidance of the topic at German universities.
They also formed committees and investigated after the fact back then!
And then they adopted it as a tactic.
No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.
That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.
This seems to have touched a nerve, based on the number of downvotes.
In this particular case that makes the message more trustworthy for me ;-)
How is this interesting? Sincerely?
Tell us more about how MIT giving AI some thought compares superiorly to 'many German universities', and please tell us more about which German universities and in which circumstances.
My statement was more of a dig at German universities than a compliment to MIT. I understand your criticism of this institution (which doesn't even exist in that form in Germany), but that doesn't mean I have to reflexively condemn everything from there.
Oh of course, I understand.
I'm just ignorant to German universities. Honestly, the only thing I know of is not even University level German education, but just the concept of the German gymnasium system, and that was from when a exchange student visited my high school, in the 1990s!
Thanks for the response. Cheers.
Then I hope you have better memories of our country.
To explain briefly:
Broadly speaking, there are these types of schools:
- Hauptschule (lower secondary school) - Realschule (intermediate secondary school) - Gymnasium (grammar school)
in various organizational forms. At a Gymnasium, you can obtain a full Abitur (university entrance qualification), which qualifies you to study at - Universities - Universities of Applied Sciences
For studies at Universities of Applied Sciences, a Fachabitur (subject-specific university entrance qualification) is necessary, which can be obtained in various ways. Previously, diplomas were usually awarded there, an academic degree between a B.A. and M.A. Since the Bologna reforms, the system has been changed to B.A./M.A.
At Universities of Applied Sciences, studies are more practically oriented (with practical phases); however, the biggest difference is that you cannot pursue a doctorate there, which is only possible at a "proper" university.
Besides social informatics, I also teach academic writing, which is why the topic of AI is important to me, because it's not easy for teachers to deal with. But I also don't think the strategy of simply looking away is effective.
Was expecting something more concrete with a set of deliverables that can actually be acted on.
Education is so cooked. In 10 years, people arent going to find it useful financially. The AI will be better at economically relevant thinking.
And there aren't enough hobbyist learners to sustain education at its current level.
To be fair, the US education system has long been "cooked" due to policies implemented many decades ago now to sacrifice excellence, exceptionalism, and true merit for engineered social stability and ruling class profiteering and plunder.
AI is an opportunity to improve true education and learning on an individual and community level based on free association without the authoritarian and violent hand of government imposing lowest common denominator uniformity on everyone to produce uniform and manageable, profitable pseudo-citizen cogs.
I figure once it collapses I'll transition into being a tutor for some billionaire's kids at roughly triple my current salary. :)
Isn't that how Parasite starts?
I'm sick and tired of hearing about how LLMs are somehow going to cultivate a society of "creative people full of ideas" when increasingly the people who are using it the most are accepting the LLMs ideas without question.
It's like assuming that the advent of fast food will create a society of people who exercise and otherwise eat well, to balance it.