Teenagers are using AI to learn math and science from celebrities
That’s called a tangent, Ariana
Few people can make as much of an impact on your life as a good teacher — the kind who makes learning delightful and fun, imparts valuable knowledge, and, above all else, prepares us for the world that awaits.
Of course, not all teachers are quite as engaging as we’d like them to be. In days gone by, tough luck. In 2024, students have a few more options thanks to the advent of generative AI, and the youth of today are taking full advantage, creating content that uses the likenesses of celebrities such as Morgan Freeman, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump, to learn about math and more.
Take this video from @onlocklearning on Instagram in which very-much-not-real versions of “Eminem” and “Ariana Grande” explain the concept of the exponential function.
Or this one from the same account — which has more than 566,000 followers — in which rapper “Cardi B” and Amazon founder “Jeff Bezos” answer the question that all teens are just dying to know the answer to: why (a+b)² = a² + 2ab + b².
These videos are part of a small but growing trend of educational clips created for a new crop of students who, for better or worse (probably worse?), are used to consuming vertical video content on their phones. They share many of the hallmarks of viral TikTok or Reels videos:
Quick cuts and slick editing.
Music, often remixed.
Very high information density; the jokes come quick and fast, and so do the equations.
Child’s play
As with any emerging technology, watching how younger people actually use it is one of the best predictors of where it might go. Clearly, part of the appeal of these videos is that they are genuinely useful. The “script” is clearly written by a human, and the math concepts depicted are illustrated beautifully. But, there’s no denying that the gimmick of having AI celebrities, like Jenna Ortega and Barack Obama, explain the concepts, is core to the appeal on social media.
It’s not hard to imagine a well-funded company commodifying this type of content into a product. Indeed, many of the accounts appear to be creating the AI educational content simply as a marketing funnel for whatever tool helped to create the videos.
The more you know
Despite concerns about Gen AI tools spewing misinformation and getting basic facts wrong (like how many Rs are there in “strawberry”), the potential to create new learning tools with the technology, or just reduce the burden of creating learning resources for teachers, is a market potentially worth tens of billions of dollars.
Last year, Morgan Stanley estimated that “Generative AI could bring $200 billion in value to the global education sector by 2025”.
Interestingly, data from a new report out yesterday from Common Sense Media found that nearly 75% of teens have now experimented with at least one type of generative AI tool.
The biggest use case so far? Helping with homework.
Whether kids getting help on their assignments from chatbots is actually a good thing for their learning is yet to be seen, but there’s a big difference between getting ChatGPT to write your history essay and enlisting fake Snoop Dogg to help you with calculus.
