SAIL: AI & Human Development, Pope, AI Tutors
May 9, 2025
Welcome to Sensemaking, AI, and Learning (SAIL). I focus on AI and higher education.
AI & Learning
The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance learning perception and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis: "The results indicate that ChatGPT has a large positive impact on improving learning performance (g = 0.867) and a moderately positive impact on enhancing learning perception (g = 0.456) and fostering higher-order thinking (g = 0.457)" The learning impact is substantive. I would argue it’s so substantive (and coupled with assessment links below) that universities need to figure out what cognitive escalation looks like in the future and how metacognition will be taught and emerging literacies, outside of AI literacies, will be be addressed. What does a degree look like when the critical things being learner are not the technical knowledge that today underpins most degrees?
We’re in a race between the advancement of frontier models and the value add that AI wrappers provide to organizations and individuals. As wrappers get successful, they’ll be purchased by core LLM providers (see Windsurf being purchased by OpenAI for $3b for exhibit A). In education, we likely have a few years for small organizations to solve discrete problems before being purchased, or obliterated. YouLearn is one - focusing on personalization and academic data. At some point, questions will be raised by faculty: is their course material ok to be uploaded and used to create personalized instruction and assessment?
Perplexity and Wiley have signed a partnership: “This new collaboration will allow Perplexity users including college students educators and researchers at institutions… to access purchased Wiley educational collections and resources in areas such as nursing business and engineering. This includes streamlined access to specialized Wiley collections giving users a new pathway to discover and interact with authoritative resources across many academic domains.” So…RAG?
Cheating is ruining education. No. An incredibly fragile system that is optimized to provide surface level and scaled assessment of learners is no longer valid due to advancement of AI. What AI does is reveal how silly the existing assessment regime is.
AI is competing with the job market. “Something strange, and potentially alarming, is happening to the job market for young, educated workers.” The chart toward the end of this article is insane in terms of decline of software engineering roles in AI organizations.
Students need to brace for change “Google DeepMind's CEO says undergraduates should spend their time "learning to learn."...Upon graduation students should know their passions and the core fundamentals he said.” The point of knowing any particular thing is called into question when it’s so readily accessible in dialogic form (as it is with AI). The ability to navigate the emerging world is what matters most.
AI may not replace work as rapidly as thought. Because it adds new work. “The study revealed that AI chatbots actually created new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers including some who did not use the tools themselves offsetting potential time savings. For example many teachers now spend time detecting whether students use ChatGPT for homework while other workers review AI output quality or attempt to craft effective prompts.”
AI Technology
I’m buying 100 acres in the midwest, I’m getting cattle and chickens Just so you know. You should be scared.
The web is dying. Startling trends. Gemini is grabbing interest from developers, but the possible Google revenue loss from a dying web would be tough to replace.
OpenAI is staying sort of non-profit.
Temperamental robots. Yikes.
AI & Humanity
AI and Human Development. This needs time to digest. But the message is critical “We are at a crossroads: while AI promises to redefine our future it also risks deepening the divides of a world already off balance. Are we on the verge of an AI-powered renaissance—or sleepwalking into a future ruled by inequality and eroded freedoms?”
2-Day work week? Gates “singled out doctors and teachers as two pathways that will experience replacement—but to the benefit of society as a whole.”
The new Pope is worried about AI: “He identified AI as one of the main issues facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labor.”
I see dead people This is interesting with all sorts of ethics implications, never mind the affronting moral implications. “An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas the man who shot me it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances””
Road to safer AI. I have mentioned Bengio’s work on safety for the last several newsletters. This article is in that vein. “Imagine you’re in a car with your loved ones following an unfamiliar road up a spectacular mountain range. The problem? The way ahead is shrouded in fog newly built and lacking both signposts and guardrails. The farther you go the more it’s clear you might be the first ones to ever drive this route. To either side you catch glimpses of precipitous slopes. Given the thickness of the fog taking a curve too fast could send you tumbling in a ditch or—worst case scenario—cause you to plunge down a cliffside. The current trajectory of AI development feels much the same—an exhilarating but unnerving journey into an unknown where we could easily lose control.”