This week we finally got to address the elephant that’s been in just about every room, artifical intelligence. It is the new kid on the block and it has been making it’s presence known.
The big thing that everyone is worried about right now is AI being used for cheating. After discussing this topic as a class, I’m honetly a little more worried now. AI detectors were brought up and it seems they are practicly useless.
ChatGPT (and other AI) raise several other issues as well. There is the risk that artists face to their craft, the massive energy cost, the degredation of privacy laws, biased information, and the fact that AI regularly makes stuff up among many other issues. And yet it is still becoming more and more popular. This is due to the convenience that it offers in dealing with mundane tasks. There are teachers that use it to help write lesson plans or practice problems for students. Students might use it to check grammar or summarize something. While I am not against using AI after I already know the skill, it is concerning to see people jump right to AI without first learning.
We were given a few pieces of advice going forward, the three that stuck best with me were:
Demystify AI: It is important for our students to understand this new technology that will affect their lives, and not to just view it as a magic box
Focus on the Learning Process: Education is already moving away from just focussing on the end result, and taking a more holistic view of the journey. If this is the focus of your class, then AI won’t be as harmful
Celebrate Humanness: Cultivate skills that AI cannot do. This one is honestly pretty hard, as it is difficult to know what AI will be capable of in the future. How many complex processess can be broken down into a really long series of yes or no questions? We used to think the Turing Test would mark when an AI would become sentient, but with large language models that idea has gone out the window.