AI in Education: Boon or Bane?
By Diane Medved
If you care about top-notch schools and parental involvement, how do you feel about your child receiving that tailored education from an artificially intelligent Bot? Education is one of the first and most pervasive incursions of AI into our lives, its influence spreading like lava in Iceland.
Newspapers (remember those?), social media, movies, newsfeeds and podcasts debate AI’s impact as either replacing or enhancing human analysis and creativity, in a plethora of fields. “…we brace ourselves for a future populated by all kinds of smart, possibly sentient machines that will disrupt our most cherished notions of what it means to be human,” writes AO Scott in his NY Times essay on AI as either gimmick or Gehinnom. Most writing jobs, yea, most generative activities, are at risk of extinction, and many of us are already tired of hearing about it. Let’s jump to the future and get it over with.
Teachers and parents ask, “Do people really need to know how to write when they can now instruct ChatGPT to produce a story, apology, life plan, exercise program, personalized monthly menu or a script for negotiating a raise?” What might humans be required to do, other than learn prompts?
When Siri and Alexa came on the scene several years ago, many fretted that knowledge was too accessible, causing research skills to atrophy. No one needs read a map, learn math, or look up any historical fact. A smartphone is infinitely smarter than any individual. These “conversational AI” bots can interact to retrieve information we’d likely be too lazy to find on our own.
With AI bots harboring stratospheres of data, teachers worry that their instruction is in vain. My daughter, a high school English teacher, says that students’ use of AI is the most vexing issue to colleagues in her department. Students are so proficient at prompting bots that teachers can’t tell what was actually written by their high schoolers. “I’ve had a few incidents,” Sarah admits, “where students said they wrote something and they hadn’t. Some kids are poor at prompting, but they’re all understanding AI better.” Since entire classes learn the same literature, she’s able to recognize when the AI bot generates fake quotations, which she quickly catches.
But educators and parents wonder: “Is there value in even teaching children to write when they’ll always have ChatGPT to do it for them?” Are writing skills obsolete?
Sarah described assigning her 9th graders papers on Romeo and Juliet, with the goal of teaching “Habits of mind, to be better thinkers, speakers and readers. It’s not about the paper produced, but about how to put thoughts into words.” It’s the process, not the product.
But for journalists, the product is indeed the point. The New York Times filed suit in Federal District Court against Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement last year, saying the companies used “millions of articles” to train their artificial intelligence bots. Now, according to coverage in The Times itself, these companies should be prohibited from turning around and using the copyrighted material to compete with its source.
Developers of AI are definitely profiting. The Times says OpenAI, in which Microsoft invested $13 billion earlier this year, is valued at more than $80 billion. Its new cloud-based Copilot Pro, for $20 per month “can create custom Copilot assistants to write emails, help code, design and perform research, among other tasks,” says a Forbes report. It notes that a trial version used in the UK to “write generative emails to customers” of an energy firm boosted customer satisfaction “from 65% to 85%, while saving the company millions in human labor costs.”
Trend-researcher Exploding Topics says “the global AI market is valued at over $136 billion, and is projected to increase by over thirteen times over the next seven years.” They add in January, 2024 that the market size of AI is expected to grow by at least 120% between this year and next.
What will happen to those human laborers AI replaces? Will they have to retrain, like blacksmiths and buggy-whip manufacturers? Business Insider listed the ten classes of jobs likely to go. First up were tech jobs (coders, programmers, software engineers, data analysts). Here in Seattle, tech companies have recently experienced waves of layoffs during a post-Covid “year of efficiency,” with firms like T-Mobile cutting more than 400, Qualtrics 780, and hundreds slashed in divisions at biggest-players Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
Also on the block due to AI, according to Business Insider, are media jobs involving writing (advertising, content creation, technical writing journalism), Paralegals and Legal Assistants, Market Research Analysts, Financial Analysts and Advisors, Wall Street Traders, Graphic Designers, Accountants, Customer Service Agents, and… Teachers.
A January New York Times article asks, “Will Chatbots Teach Your Children?” In our Northwest community, known for its fine public schools with an engaged community, this becomes a critical issue. Many families moved here specifically to ensure a strong education for their children, often undertaking a large financial burden. A TED Talk by Sal Kahn that garnered millions of views enthused that AI can customize instruction to fit children’s needs, serving them better than human teachers, and addressing gaps between students. His Kahn Academy has adopted its own school-centric AI chatbot, ostensibly designed to teach critical thinking rather than produce answers. And yet, it warns that even the machine tutor “makes mistakes sometimes.”
I recall volunteering to help at my son’s Middle School computer lab a decade ago, and the programming skills of students were impressive. Debate then centered on the role of computers in the classroom. Now the question is whether smartphones should be allowed there. Will AI simply add to children’s time staring into screens? Will its empathy and responsiveness further alienate individuals from family and friends, retarding social skills?
Turns out there’s scant data about the effectiveness of AI in education. My quick search of the research yielded plenty of descriptions of AI’s ability to individualize instruction, but not much comparing AI with other forms of learning, and certainly no longitudinal results. It seems there’s a lot of enthusiasm about the potential, and little evidence that gaps in learning are better bridged using simply a smarter computer friend.
As for my own experience with ChatGPT, I have but one. What you’re reading is completely self-generated, but when I wanted to create a birthday poem for my dear husband, my daughter Sarah and I provided the free ChatGPT version a stack of facts about the birthday boy, and asked for a poem in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General.” I won’t reveal the payoff, but let me say…the results were lame. The rhymes plebian, the content twisted and the final outcome…hilarious. Reading it to the assembled party-goers was the hit of the evening. My own poem was a parody of ChatGPT’s “effort,” and while I’ll immodestly say it was far superior, the best laughs followed format and descriptors in Chat’s limp lines.
Diane Medved, Ph.D. is a psychologist, speaker and author of 7 books. She’s married to author, podcaster and nationally-syndicated talk radio host Michael Medved. They can be seen in the Seattle area picking up litter with grabber and bag with some of their five adorable grandchildren. Reach Diane at DianeMedved.com.
Very well done, thank you, Diane. This issue is much like the debate over whether to teach cursive writing. I'm of the school that believes that the process of learning how to and repeating the process of writing in cursive embeds in our brains a creative spark. While I can now revive that spark by writing on a keyboard, I have found that the process of setting out to write about something often if I'm lucky leads to something new. But that happens only because I put in the time and effort to work it out. We do our children a great disservice if we enable them to go through life without ever having learned how to do the research, collate the information and present it in writing in a way the reveals the author's imprint.