←back to thread

Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

(research.google)
359 points FromTheArchives | 1 comments | 18 Sep 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
mossTechnician ◴[18 Sep 25 19:17 UTC] No.45293795[source]▶
I wonder how this will contribute to our current declining literacy rates in a social climate that's already rife with anti-intellectualism and isolation. Even if this worked well, it appears to be to be a step backwards.

Call me pessimistic, but this technology looks more poised to replace teachers in schools than supplement them.

replies(2): >>45293948 #>>45294664 #
1. mobattah ◴[18 Sep 25 20:33 UTC] No.45294664[source]▶
Cultural obituaries are often premature, and the one for literacy is no exception. A nascent contrary impulse is emerging: readers deliberately turning to long-form works as a form of intellectual resistance. I’ve been working through Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy and Tom Heehler’s The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, not just to expand vocabulary but to restore the sinew of productive speech.

That project led me to conscript AI as a private tutor. With custom instructions, ChatGPT and Gemini now surface new words and nudge my prose toward clarity, turning a vague fear of erosion into conviction. A dedicated subset of users will inevitably harness such tools to strengthen their expressive range and communicative precision.

Until recently, my writing rarely left emails and journals. Now, with AI as scaffold and sparring partner, I draft short stories from my own life and recast them in the voices of authors I admire. This feels less like a technology poised to supplant teachers, and more like the substrate for a renaissance in autodidactic education.