This past spring as I finished my 18th year of teaching, I felt fear I had never felt before at the end of a school year. By the time grades come in and the signs of summer come, teachers can typically breathe for the first time in nine months. Instead of the relaxation, fun, and achievement that normally awaits at the end of an academic year, I was consumed with concerns that this might be the last time in a career spanning nearly two decades that I taught a class without me having to worry about AI.
I get it: AI has technically been around forever, and natural language processing tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are based on decades of research. Anyone who has used spell checker or language translation apps or heard a spoken text message has used language processing tools powered by AI technology. But many of the teachers I know haven’t been overly concerned so far about the extent to which AI could infiltrate our classrooms.
Most teachers keep a reasonable track of technology and do our best to teach our students how to use it responsibly. Many see technology as a learning tool, and I’ve long believed that students are more engaged when their classes make extensive use of it.
But as the old Latin saying goes, all things change, and we change with them. No one knows this reality better than teachers. When ChatGPT broke into the mainstream last November, we couldn’t have foreseen how our work might be affected.
As it turned out, ChatGPT was the fastest growing consumer application in history, reaching 100 million active users just two months after launch, according to a report from Reuters. For context, it took TikTok nine months and Instagram two years to hit the same milestone, according to data from Sensor Tower, a digital data analytics company.
Suddenly my best didn’t seem good enough. By the time the next academic year kicks into high gear, I’ll need knowledge about AI that didn’t seem at all urgent or even necessary a year ago. I will spend much of this summer learning as much as I can about how AI is impacting education, students and classrooms. Perhaps most importantly, I need to get smarter about ethically integrating AI into my classes. With these goals in mind, I began a search for resources to familiarize myself with AI. After all, the best defense is a good offense. Here are some of the things I learned.
Ethics and AI in Education
Concerns about whether computers and robots will replace humans in any profession are as old as the day is long, and there is a real fear that AI will increase income inequality in many jobs and professions, especially teachers. These issues are legitimate (and scary) and need to be addressed. But depending on who you ask, AI may or may not replace teachers in the near future.
Bill Gates famously remarked that AI is about to be as good as teachers at teaching (and implying to some that we will soon be replaced), but he would say that. Gates has invested billions in his own ideas of what education should be like and probably wants to recoup his investment – an issue that raises ethical questions in itself.
