I’ve run into a new problem recently when working on an AI-integrated learning application. The service works great, however there is a legitimate wrestle with the morality argument of using LLMs as a facade in front of human-created educational content.

If you want to learn something, there’s no shortage of great lectures, guides and curriculums available online — created by experienced educators and professionals who are well deserving of their students and mentees. Why not just use what’s already out there? Do we really gain anything by having an LLM regurgitate it in a different tone? It’s also somewhat criminal — LLMs use this same content as training data and runtime context to generate its outputs, every person that reads information from AI is one that isn’t reading it from the original author.

Objectively this isn’t fair at all. You’re funnelling traffic away from the original authors, diverting any sort of monetisation to the LLM providers via token-costs of content generation. While I am just morally bankrupt enough to use this sort of service for myself at an individual scale, I could never in my right mind promote usage of it from others.

So, is the idea dead?

It’s a bit of a shame — the medium is quite a nice learning experience. On-demand lesson generation tailored to your specific preferences is convienient as hell, and it’s a great replacement for doom-scrolling social media.

The stubborn arse in me wants to find a way to make it work, some equitable balance of compensation for involved parties.

How about educators/mentors get paid to act as providers of education resources to the AI service? It’d have to be via a transparent and fair contractual agreement to ensure mentors aren’t screwed out of their content and made obsolete via “training” their replacement AI mentors. There would need to be appropriate back-out and content ownership policies in place to make sure the service can’t use a mentors content without their active participation in an agreement.

The mentor/educator content platform isn’t new, so that has some proven legs. The LLM-layer as just another education tool could just be a nice new flair to the online / self-driven learning experience, an assistive layer to broaden effectiveness and reach to different learners.

Napkin math is needed before any further idea cooking, but for now I am enjoying the new learning format myself.

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