Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Classroom?

Retraction Note to: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04787-y, published online 06 May 2025. The Editor has decided to retract this paper owing to concerns regarding discrepancies in the meta-analysis. These issues ultimately undermine the confidence the Editor can place in the validity of the analysis and resulting conclusions. The authors have not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction. Retraction Note: The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysishttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07310-z

The jury’s still out on AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool, but research so far paints a grim picture. Using AI chatbots can impair critical thinking, result in lower brain activity during cognitive tasks, and has been linked to memory loss. A Major Paper Claiming AI Is Good for Students Just Got Retracted, Which Is Very Bad News for Advocates of AI in the Classroomhttps://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/study-ai-good-for-students-retracted

AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool is probably better for people who already know how to think having “learned” stuff the old fashioned way. AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool for some of the younger generations has shown promise in one area known as cheating.

Last year, a survey of some 500 Princeton seniors found that over 27 percent admitted to cheating with an AI model like ChatGPT, while about half said they knew about a violation of the honor code. If those are the numbers at a vaunted Ivy league, just imagine what conditions are like for the rest of the country. Princeton in Shambles Over AI Cheatinghttps://futurism.com/future-society/princeton-shambles-ai-cheating

BTW, the estimated cost of attendance for 2026-27 is $94,624 at Princeton U. https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid/fees-payment-options

Maybe the Princeton kids had to cheat because they offloaded too much of their own thinking and by default, didn’t learn how to think.

The risks of using generative artificial intelligence to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education… The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains… Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material. The risks of AI in schools outweigh the benefitshttps://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5674741/ai-schools-education?

Your final food for thought.

Scary Charts 05.17.26

Source – The Class of 2026 is cooked https://www.semafor.com/article/05/15/2026/ai-has-contorted-the-job-market-for-twentysomethings-leaving-college-this-may

Sourcehttps://layoffs.fyi/

“I think the junior level is definitely finding it harder now to enter the workforce,” said John Romeo, who leads the consulting firm’s research arm, the Oliver Wyman Forum. “It’s those mid- and senior-level employees that CEOs are now looking at to drive productivity.” That’s because of the types of tasks that AI agents are able to perform, from writing code at the level of a junior developer to evaluating sales leads. What the agents can’t do in many fields is make judgment calls using the insight that comes from on-the-job experience, according to labor experts. AI Poised to Tilt Job Market Leverage Toward Older Workershttps://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/ai-poised-tilt-job-market-150000094.html

Yikes!

If you managed to scroll down this far here’s a bonus video.

“Medical” Advice for the Masses

The AIs’ failure rates exceeded 80 percent when provided with given ambiguous symptoms that could match more than one condition, and for more straightforward cases that included including physical exam findings and lab results, they still failed 40 percent of the time. The researchers also found that unlike human clinicians, the “LLMs collapse prematurely onto single answers,” resulting in “weak performance” across all models. Millions of Americans Are Talking to AI Instead of Going to the Doctor, and It’s Giving Them Horrendously Flawed Medical Advicehttps://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/millions-americans-ai-instead-doctor-bad-advice

Wow.

From the study discussion section:

Our evaluation suggests that despite rapid advances in pattern recognition and knowledge retrieval, current LLMs still lack the reasoning processes needed for safe clinical use. The consistent gap between differential diagnosis and final diagnosis highlights how differently these systems process information compared with physicians. Clinicians preserve uncertainty and iteratively refine differential diagnoses, whereas LLMs collapse prematurely onto single answers, a limitation that persists across model generations. Their weak performance on differential diagnosis, consistent with a prior study from authors of the current work,8 suggests these limitations persist across early and state-of-the-art models. The risk is not just that LLMs are sometimes wrong but that their reasoning is brittle precisely where uncertainty and nuance matter most. Benchmarks that reward only correct final answers risk reinforcing this shortcutting, widening the gap between marketing claims and the skills actually required at the bedside. Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks – Rao AS, Esmail KP, Lee RS, et al. Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks. JAMA Netw Open. 2026;9(4):e264003. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.4003 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2847679

Wow.

Should you really trust health advice from an AI chatbot? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyepyy82kxo. Dr Nicholas Tiller explains: “They are designed to give very confident, very authoritative responses, and that conveys a sense of credibility, so the user assumes that it must know what it’s talking about.” He thinks chatbots should be avoided for health advice unless you have the expertise to know when the AI is getting the answers wrong.

The study’s Conclusions The audited chatbots performed poorly when answering questions in misinformation-prone health and medical fields. Continued deployment without public education and oversight risks amplifying misinformation. Tiller NB, Marcon AR, Zenone M, et al

Generative artificial intelligence-driven chatbots and medical misinformation: an accuracy, referencing and readability audit BMJ Open 2026;16:e112695. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2025-112695 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/16/4/e112695

Wow.

Now go read this thread posted on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gratuz_ai-llm-activity-7358862577512165376-Q7AA

Yikes.

America’s Largest Hospital System Ready to Start Replacing Radiologists With AI

“We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,”
Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of New York’s 11-hospital public benefit corporation

Mohammed Suhail, a radiologist at North Coast Imaging in San Diego, told Radiology that Katz’s comments are “undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients (and are) ..“easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care.”

America’s Largest Hospital System Ready to Start Replacing Radiologists With AI, Its CEO Says – https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/hospital-ceo-ai-radiology

Confidently. Uninformed.

Yikes.