A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

The lesson here is adapt or die. The things they thought were important or difficult or impressive are no longer any of those things. Regurgitating information on a test or generating prose from the notes you took in class are tasks which are easy to stereotype, and now readily automated.

Rather than framing this as destroying education, it should be interpreted as proof that these tasks were always shallow. AI is still much worse than humans at important things, why not focus on those things instead?

The school systems are clearly not keeping up. Any kid who isn't doing project oriented creative work, aided by an LLM as needed, is not preparing for the the world they will likely inherit.

There's a lot more to adapting than that. "Project-oriented creative work" builds on foundational skills. Basic knowledge, logic, numeracy, etc. That stuff all needs to be developed in the brain before you can use it to do interesting and valuable creative work. A lot of that stuff gets developed by hard work training on exercises that, yep, AI already knows how to do.

Pocket calculators have been available for 50+ years. Would you hire an engineer who couldn't instantly multiply 8 times 7? What about one who couldn't tell you the difference between linear growth and exponential growth? These are examples of skills that need to be learned, even if they're available externally, so that technical and creative work can build on them.