Episode
AI Sessions #5: How AI Broke Education
- Published
- Dec 4, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 3356
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Summary
Henry Shevlin and I sat down to discuss a topic that is currently driving both of us slightly insane: the impact of AI on education. On the one hand, the educational potential of AI is staggering. Modern large language models like ChatGPT offer incredible opportunities for 24/7 personal tutoring on any topic you might want to learn about, as well as many other benefits that would have seemed like science fiction only a few years ago. One of the really fun parts of this conversation was discussing how we personally use AI to enhance our learning, reading, and thinking. On the other hand, AI has clearly blown up the logic of teaching and assessment across our educational institutions, which were not designed for a world in which students have access to machines that are much better at writing and many forms of problem-solving than they are. And yet… there has been very little adaptation. The most obvious example is that many universities still use take-home essays to assess students. This is insane. We discuss this and many other topics in this conversation, including: * How should schools and colleges adapt to a world with LLMs? * How AI might exacerbate certain inequalities. * Whether AI-driven automation of knowledge work undermines the value of the skills that schools and colleges teach today. * How LLMs might make people dumber. Conspicuous Cognition is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Links * John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times , Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power? * James Walsh, New York Magazine , Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College * Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic , Accommodation Nation Transcript Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain mistakes. Dan Will…