Don’t believe the hype (even if they got all the money)

In 2010 I was a high school math teacher. I got invited to an EdTech conference at Google’s headquarters. I was one of a handful of teachers in the room. The rest of the attendees were engineers, VC’s, investors, and tech evangelists. Presentation after presentation promised that Silicon Valley was going to disrupt all of education. There was almost no disagreement. They were all so sure of themselves. I wrote an email to myself, “these fools think they can replace teachers with self-paced YouTube videos.”

Teaching is hard and slow. Teaching someone to read or divide fractions of how to hit a jump shot is not scalable. It’s tedious and requires a real commitment to “human capital.” But, SV had so much money behind them and school systems purchased so much bloat and so many smart boards (when what teachers wanted was better copiers). The techbros were wrong about replacing teachers with software in 2010.

It’s 2024, and some of the same tech bros are claiming that they can replace artists and writers and journalists with statistical models. For me, it’s 2010 all over again. They are wrong, but they have so much money to spend.

Eventually, people will realize that like teaching, making art, or writing prose, or poems, is hard and tedious, and is not scalable because it requires a commitment to “human capital” and “human ingenuity.”

You can’t replace creativity with a statistical model, no matter how many parameters or how large the training set.

If anything, there is an opportunity for organizations to arbitrage the hype. If your competitor replaces their journalists with an LLM, hire those people. In the short run, while VC money hides the true cost of running prompts, your competitor will look smart, but you’ll have a lock on creativity. While the world gets filled with the muck of generative avergeness, you can stand out by being human, authentic, and novel, all things that a statistical model cannot do.

(I checked in on Khan Academy the other day and it is now powered by ChatGPT and that made me giggle, then deep sigh. This is the opposite of irony, it is exactly what is expected.)