DeepL translation
Elon Musk’s company xAI is partnering with the government of El Salvador to launch the first national AI-based education program, offering personalized tutoring to more than one million students in over 5,000 public schools.
El Salvador has a clear appetite for new technologies, an interest largely embodied by its president, Nayib Bukele, one of their most fervent supporters. A few years ago, the small Central American country even became the first in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. This venture ultimately failed, as the cryptocurrency was never used by the majority of Salvadorans and is no longer legal tender in the country.
But El Salvador does not intend to stop there in the technological arena. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has announced a partnership with the government to “launch the world’s first national AI-based education program.” According to the authorities, this personalized tutoring system will be based on artificial intelligence and will involve more than one million students in over 5,000 public schools.
A controversial chatbot
But El Salvador did not choose just any artificial intelligence. Close to Donald Trump, with whom he signed an extradition agreement allowing migrants arrested in the United States to be held in its prisons, President Nayib Bukele turned to AI developed by Elon Musk’s company, Musk himself having long been close to the White House tenant.
Or Grok, xAI’s chatbot, is much better known for its excesses than for its educational ambitions. Over the past year, it has notably distinguished itself by spreading anti-Semitic content, promoting conspiracy theories, evoking a “white genocide,” and making the unfounded claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
In a publication that is the subject of complaints filed by the League of Human Rights (LDH) and SOS Racisme, Grok even went so far as to claim that the gas chambers at the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz were “designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus (…) rather than for mass executions,” a statement that amounts to Holocaust denial. A first? Not really.
While El Salvador is promoting a national AI-based education program, the United States is already experimenting with this type of teaching on a smaller scale. Artificial intelligence is used in particular in certain charter schools, which are publicly funded but autonomously managed institutions that enjoy considerable pedagogical freedom.
These schools, which serve nearly 4 million students across the country, are testing new educational models with a focus on results. Arizona, one of the states with the most charter schools, has established itself as a prime testing ground for these experiments, as exemplified by Unbound Academy, which has developed a curriculum largely based on artificial intelligence.
Estonia has also already taken the plunge, this time with OpenAI. In February, the company announced a partnership enabling secondary school students and teachers to benefit from a personalized ChatGPT. However, other experiments have shown their limitations: in rural Colombia, the use of Meta chatbots has been criticized by teachers, who blame this technology for some of the poor results and exam failures.
It remains to be seen whether this educational shift will suffer the same fate as El Salvador’s bitcoin plan. Despite its failure to gain widespread adoption among the population, the government continues to support the cryptocurrency, claiming to buy and hold reserves, while Nayib Bukele is betting on a future surge in prices, particularly thanks to Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The question now is: will Grok follow the same trajectory in Salvadoran schools?
El Salvador is cooked.
I thought it was going to be in charge of their concentration camp
It’ll probably end up being put in charge of everything, including their concentration camps.
maybe someone can tell it that el salvadoreans are white and it’ll open the doors to prevent a recurrence of what’s going on in South Africa
It was either this or the Mormons and Evangelicals. A real pick your poison.
What can one say, except “unlimited genocide on the first world
”.
Outside of AI chat bots sucking in general, I think they are particularly inadequate for tutoring schoolchildren because a lot of children are simply uncooperative. They will not prompt their assigned AI tutor to tell them how to do linear algebra, they will prompt it to write a poem about how girls are icky.
Most kids don’t understand why they learn the things they do at school and they don’t want to do it, that’s why they need an adult authority figure to hit them with the “You have to do it because I say so” sometimes. A sycophantic chat bot can’t do that. There is no way it can deal with the endless amount of nonsense children will throw at it to get around having to do schoolwork.
An AI tutor could maybe work for university students, adults who understand why learning the material is in their interest and who will engage with it in good faith. But you effectively have to treat children as bad actors in this context and I don’t believe for a second that Grok of all things is equipped to deal with them.
Experimenting on children at massive scale in economically disadvantaged countries, gambling with their foundational education.
Sick sad world.
The people there cannot catch a break at all
Central Americans as a whole live to suffer.
We’re not prepared for how stupid people are about to become globally.
throwback to pre-WWII where most people were illiterate, on purpose.
People that read to their kids will be looked at like helicopter parents
Grok just asked for a 12 year old’s nudes a couple months back.
“It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.”
