I think the controversial part about AI is far above the "it is a new technology so use it".

When the scientific calculator was invented, people could easily know what went into its production. As in what circuitry appears in them. You knew that if you bought it, it is yours. Want to program it? Grab a book and do this. The whole package would be a fixed price. You are in control. With AI? You are not at all in control. You rely on a big tech giant (or just like 4 useful ones) who is riding what people controversially still call an economic disaster. You are relying on a technology that is designed to very likely bait-and-switch you. As soon as you get too comfortable with AI, the big tech companies can just bump the prices up and you will not be able to say no. You rely on a technology that you do not control.

The comparison of AI to a calculator or any other technological advancement for students is apples and oranges for that reason.

Imagine giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them. This may be more of a fair comparison.

PS Training students on using AI, especially for free, is setting them up for reliance on the big tech companies and the subscription model.

Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.

> but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute

Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.

There are simpler LLMs that run on much cheaper devices and are still helpful for baseline tasks. Of course they are prone to hallucinating once they reach the limits of their world knowledge, but this also changes their effectiveness in an educational context: they can help you polish a paper (much of their reliable knowledge is about language, syntax and style/pragmatics of the input texts), but you still have to plan the writing on your own.

Maybe teaching students to take their whatever devices to run AI is the way, sure. All I tried to say is if we're teaching students to think independently, we should teach them independent tools.

It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.

That however requires significant investments - either each computer gets a powerful GPU for local inference (which cost a fortune) or the school gets a rack worth of compute. Most schools however even struggle to get their children fed.

Another issue is that it forces kids to stay in school for longer to do their homework, which can be a serious problem in rural areas where public transport is limited, so parents are forced to fetch their kids from school which may not be compatible with working hours.