Another death in the AI-in-education family

Pour one out for OpenAI's Study Mode

A classic

Well here we are, still reeling from the emotional devastation of Dan Meyer’s poignant eulogy for the recently deceased Khanmigo, only to have yet another tragic death in the AI-in-education family. Please join me, won’t you, in offering condolescences to the recent passing of ChatGPT’s “Study Mode,” and may its memory be a blessing.

What’s that, you don’t remember Study Mode? Tragedy on top of tragedy. You see, one year ago almost to the day, a relentless wave of negative press hit OpenAI as journalists discovered that students were using chatbots en masse to avoid effortful thinking, aka “to cheat.” As such, the company quickly announced a new product feature within ChatGPT that would ensure it would be used solely for educational good rather than evil: Study Mode. And OpenAI promised us that when Study Mode was activated, ChatGPT would “be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something.”

There were, of course, some obvious challenges with Study Mode, as people quickly observed. For one thing…

So good

…and for another…

Still, flaws notwithstanding, over the last year we could at least say that Study Mode…existed…as something that students seeking cognitive repentance might activate to curb their wicked cheating ways. That is to say, if they clicked the little “+” in the prompt box, there they could find Study Mode, waiting for activation such that—and here again I quote from OpenAI’s press release—students would “think critically about their learning.”

Alas, critical thinking is dead, and so too is Study Mode for all intents and purposes. Two weeks ago, I debated James Donovan, OpenAI’s Head of Learning & Cognitive Outcomes Research, regarding the role of chatbots in education. As our conversation kicked off, moderator Alex Grodd expressed some befuddlement related to his inability to find Study Mode, and Donovan confirmed it is no longer a tool that ChatGPT users can directly access in the “vanilla model” (that is, normal ChatGPT). Instead, ChatGPT will now allegedly “detect” when students are trying to study and then automatically refrain from providing answers. To which I say:

Donovan did suggest that for “B2B” users of ChatGPT in education—which apparently means countries such as Estonia that have partnered with OpenAI to embed ChatGPT in their education systems (shudder)—Study Mode will remain an option. Cool, that’s nice for Estonian kids, but not really relevant to the 400 million students worldwide who are using vanilla ChatGPT every day.¹ Donovan, a smart and engaging guy, thus ended up arguing—based on secret OpenAI data—that students really are “cognitively augmenting” their education. You can judge for yourself how persuasive that is:

Study Mode was always a ruse, of course, a PR exercise masquerading as pedagogical safeguard, but while it’s admittedly fun to dance upon its grave, something bigger is happening at OpenAI regarding its education posture. Remember last year when Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s VP of Education, promised us an “education moonshot”? I think she’s still employed there, but the entire “moonshot division” at OpenAI appears to have run up the curtain to join the choir invisible as the company desperately tries to figure out how to generate revenue in advance of its suddenly somewhat dicey IPO prospects.

To wit: a few weeks ago Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer and de facto COO at present, issued an org-wide memo that leaked—and boy, it’s hard to see how education fits in to what they have planned going forward. Time for a brief fisking:

As we start Q2, I want to begin where we always should: with our customers. I have been spending time with leaders across our largest enterprises, most influential startups, and key venture firms. The message is clear. People are excited about what we are building, and they want a deeper view into our roadmap so they can plan with confidence and stay ahead of the market.

Enterprises, startups, and venture firms—but no mention of talking to students, who still comprise the majority of ChatGPT users (never forget this!). But students are not paying customers, and this memo is crystal clear about who really matters to OpenAI right now.

Enterprises buy business outcomes….They pay for higher revenue per employee, faster cycle times, lower support costs, and better execution.

Yep, this’ll map neatly to the culture of schools.

Our compute advantage sets us up to deliver continuous leaps in capability….Every step forward in compute lets us train stronger models, serve more demand, and lower the cost per unit of intelligence.

Oh yeah, teachers will love love love the idea of calculating the “per unit cost of intelligence.” Sign ‘em up.

The market has moved from prompts to agents. That shift is a massive opportunity for us.

Customers want systems that can reason, use tools, operate across workflows, and perform reliably inside real business environments.

Oh you don’t say! RIP, “prompt engineering,” long live AI agents, I guess. Does this mean we no longer need to provide professional development to teachers to improve their “AI literacy”?

I’ll remove the tongue from my cheek now, because I do believe this corporate reorientation “from prompts to agents” is a big deal, and I plan to write more about it soon. For now, though, I’ll just observe that while businesses may be lining up to have digital agentic hamsters scurrying about their databases, it’s not clear that normal humans share in that excitement. As teacher Stephen Fitzpatrick notes, “AI is being built for coders,” which is cool for them I suppose…but what about everyone else? Over to Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge:

LLMs are, at best, an enterprise technology that may make certain kinds of data organization easier, or coding faster. This has almost nothing to do with most people’s lives. Dinking around with code is a hobby many tech people enjoy and one the rest of us simply don’t care about. Making it easier to write code doesn’t change that I don’t want to write code. I have other hobbies!

Me too, Liz, me too. And look, while I’m intellectually curious about AI, there is no part of me yearning to expose my private, personal data to AI agents. Not only do I not trust the technology, I’m not even sure what I’d want a coding agent to do. John Herrman with the Intelligencer recently ran into the same problem, with hilarious results:

Unfortunately, you must now confront the problem at the heart of every AI deployment, personal or corporate, fun or fatal, lark-driven or editorially minded: What is all this automation for?

This is a recurring theme when you try out new AI tools. You recognize that there’s a lot that might be done with them, but not much comes to you. You see this in the rise of AI coding tools, which you find extraordinarily impressive as you use them to … make yourself another … news reader? Notes app? Personal website, again?

You also dimly comprehend that in trying to understand your daily habits as a series of workflows with an eye on automation, you’re going through a similar set of motions as countless thousands of companies across the economy, some of whom see nothing but opportunity in AI — to cut costs and people, or to invest and grow — while others, fearing competition and obsolescence, rush to adopt AI without knowing what problems they need to solve, much less which ones the technology can handle. You identify on an emotional level with the doomed firms buying compute they don’t really know how to use.

Mercifully, humans are not firms, and students are not enterprises. And strangely enough, I’ll be (somewhat) relieved if OpenAI pivots to “B2B,” because it should mean less education malpractice from Belsky and team. As I note in the clip below, such harms are largely invisible in the moment, but eventually they will be made apparent. The good news is that concerned parents, students, educators, journalists, and others are observing this malpractice first-hand, and they do not like what they see.²

And they—we—are organizing to stop it.

1. To be completely fair—cue Miracle Max voice—Study Mode is only mostly dead. I say that because when I reached out to OpenAI’s press team to confirm its demise, the company informed me it can still be activated by typing “/” in the prompt box. Weirdly, that seems true for the web-version of ChatGPT but not the mobile app. Of course it’s a moot point because no one knows about this option in the first place, and OpenAI’s press person did not respond to my further inquiries about why Study Mode is confined to this sad digital purgatory.

2. My thanks to Jodi Carreon for supplying this video snippet—and she’s one of the organizers helping to stem the EdTech tide in schools. More details here.