By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight.  Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent “2hr Learning” model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah.

Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. “As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” according to Unbound’s charter school application in Arizona. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”

Spending less time on traditional curriculum frees up the rest of students’ days for life-skill workshops that cover “financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving,” according to the Arizona application.

  • somedev@aussie.zone
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    20 days ago

    Why the fuck are we so accepting of everybody trying to replace real people with AI. The answer is money, obviously, but holy shit.

    • john89@lemmy.ca
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      20 days ago

      To be fair, white collar workers have become so lazy and incompetent, most of their jobs would be done better by AI.

      Charlie Kaufman had some good words to say about AI in screenwriting. Most movies released today could be written by AI and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        20 days ago

        I absolutely love Kaufman’s films, but what a garbage take. Not everything needs to be as complex or mindbending as Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine…

      • naught101@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        I’m not convinced that’s the screenwriters’ fault. I think more likely its that the mainstream movie industry knows that pastiche crap is what is most profitable, so that’s all it funds.

        Similar with pop music. Most stuff that gets made is garbage. But it doesn’t mean that amazing stuff isn’t being made, it’s just that you have to hunt for it.

        Movies are worse because the resource and people requirements for a single movie are much more substantial than for a single album.

        • john89@lemmy.ca
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          20 days ago

          I’d say it’s both.

          Not all writers are complacent with potboiling, but most of them are and it’s what makes them average.

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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    21 days ago

    I’m sure an AI babysitter won’t be immediately and utterly broken and bypassed by every single kid in these “classes”.

    (Seriously: we’re talking about 8-12 year olds here and the absolutely are smart enough and incentivized to break the ever-loving crap out of this stupid idea.)

    • Peffse@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      At that age I figured out that I could bypass the policy restrictions on my computer by unplugging the Ethernet cable right after login. Gave me full local admin.

      A year or so prior to that I figured out that if you viewed IE’s temporary internet files and just backspaced your way up, you can access the otherwise restricted C:, where I found other kids had already installed games onto.

      No way this works for a full school year.

      • quixotic120@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        I’m old so things were easier but I remember in my middle school days I figured out you could bypass the schools content filter by using babelfish to translate the page from English to English in like 1998. Somehow accidentally stumbled across the concept of a proxy

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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        21 days ago

        A year or so prior to that I figured out that if you viewed IE’s temporary internet files and just backspaced your way up, you can access the otherwise restricted C:\

        Public library Halo classic… good old days

        Library software today can be wayyyyy better and lock down all the old tricks. Gotta count on the kids to keep cat ‘n’ mousing for their generation.

        • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          21 days ago

          A few of my friends and myself ended up with the network admin password, so we had full administrative access to every computer. Ah, the good old days.

          • Peffse@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            daaang, I completely forgot about when the Novell NetWare administrator forgot to purge the account management tool in the temp folder. I found it and was able to give myself network admin priv.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      21 days ago

      Problem is that yes they will probably do that and get away with it and a bunch of kids get to have a bunch of fun … learn very little other than how to cheat and get by and they get a passing grade and go through school learning nothing.

      • ifItWasUpToMe@lemmy.ca
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        21 days ago

        To be fair, the kids smart enough to cheat it would have, most likely, learned nothing in regular school as well

        • jrs100000@lemmy.world
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          21 days ago

          In 20 years the gen alphas are walking around getting double Human Chow rations for no reason and not even fulfilling their work quotas. Then, when the Overseers come to discipline then there are these weird pulses of light and the drones wander off mumbling about how, as a large language model, they have no opinion about that topic. We beg them for help, or maybe some left over kibble, but those stupid kids just laugh and say “OK Xers”.

    • flameguy21@lemm.ee
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      21 days ago

      When I was in school, someone figured out that if you go into Google Translate and type in a link, you could go to whatever website you wanted. We also figured out that despite Google Images being blocked, you could just click on the images tab of Google search and use it that way. Even the teachers told us about that one lol.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      Yes and no. It really depends on the model.

      The newest Claude Sonnet I’d probably guess will come in above average compared to the humans available for a program like this in making learning fun and personally digestible for each student.

      The newest Gemini models could literally cost kids their lives.

      The gap between what the public is aware of (and even what many employees at labs, including the frontier ones) and the reality of just how far things have come in the last year is wild.

      • naught101@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        I can see how this might be true if an AI can respond to individual cues from a single kid, which a teacher can’t reliably do because they have to look after 30 kids at once.

        I’m skeptical that those cue responses will be reasonable though. Maybe in the mean, but I reckon there’s gonna be some wild and potentially traumatic edge cases.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    This seems like a great machine to create republican voters, purposefully undereducated and perpetually frightened - the school to joe rogan pipeline

    Arizona State Board for Charter Schools

    Imagine the AMAZING individuals that must make up this group.

    In its Arizona application, Unbound says its bold claims about how much its students will learn are based on the experiment it’s running on students in Texas, inspired by Elon Musk.

    The cancer that had metastasized to all systems

  • childOfMagenta@lemm.ee
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    20 days ago

    “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged”.

    They will be challenged alright.

  • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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    21 days ago

    🤦‍♀️

    The annoying part is that some time of self paced computerized curriculum is genuinely a good idea that I’ve been supporting for ages. But the whole premise is that this allows the teacher to spend more time in one on one instruction to get students over the hump when they have questions.

    It doesn’t work as an excuse to throw out the teacher.

  • DNU@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    I also think this sucks massively, yet the possibility of a well made curriculum focused on one Person dies sound enticing. So much less time wasted on stuff one child has no problems with vs another that’s just stuck at some logical step. Ofc no social interaction is such a big - it almost can’t be fixed.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      20 days ago

      Yeah, I want to hate it (and I do) but the idea is great. It’s just that there’s no way in hell the AI is doing the same job as a teacher. It’d also be very hard to tell if it’s working correctly. Who’s going to tell them it’s not? The student?

      I do think we need to modify our educational system to better suit people with different needs, but this should be through increased funding for more teachers, not AI to increase profits.

        • Simple Jack@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Yes. But not before cheating. Asked my boss as he was passing by. “How many R’s in ‘strawberry’”, I says to him. He almost answered but caught himself. Then he sort of peered upward, thinking. Then he grinned and said, “nice one, rhsjj.” And then went about his day.

          I still don’t know the damned answer.

  • ignirtoq@fedia.io
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    21 days ago

    As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content

    This will be a nightmare for any neuro-divergent students, or really any student with atypical learning needs.

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      Atypical kids being left behind is a feature, not a bug. There’s a shocking amount of parents even in the year of our Lord 2024 who think we’re “too much” of a drain on schooling.