End User

This past spring, as I closed out my 18th year of teaching, I felt anxiety that I’d never before felt at the end of a school year. By the time grades are submitted and signs of summer arrive, teachers are typically able to breathe for the first time in nine months. Instead of the relaxation, joy, and accomplishment that typically awaits the end of an academic year, I was consumed with worry that this might be the last time in a nearly two-decade career that I taught a class without having to worry about AI.

I get it–AI has technically been around forever, and natural language processing tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are built on decades of research. Anyone who has used spellcheck or language translation apps or heard a spoken text message has used language processing tools driven by AI technology. But many of the teachers with whom I’m acquainted haven’t been too concerned about the extent to which AI might infiltrate our classrooms until now.

Most teachers keep up with technology to a reasonable extent and do our best to teach our students how to use it responsibly. Many view technology as a teaching asset, and I’ve long believed that students are more engaged when their lessons make ample use of it.

However, as the old Latin saying goes, all things change, and we change with them. No one knows this reality better than teachers. When ChatGPT exploded onto the mainstream last November, we could not have anticipated how our work might be impacted.

As it turned out, ChatGPT was the fasting-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100 million active users a mere two months after launch, according to a report by Reuters. For context, it took TikTok nine months and Instagram two years to achieve the same milestone, according to data from Sensor Tower, a digital data analysis firm.

Suddenly, doing my best didn’t seem good enough. By the time the next academic year kicks into high gear, I will need knowledge about AI that didn’t seem at all urgent or even necessary one year ago. I’ll spend a good part of this summer learning as much as I can about how AI affects education, students, and classroom spaces. Perhaps most important, I’ll need to get smarter about how to ethically incorporate AI into my teaching. With these goals in mind, I began a quest for resources in the spirit of getting familiar with AI. After all, the best defense is a good offense. Here are some of the things I learned.

Concerns about whether computers and robots will replace human beings in any profession are as old as the day is long, and there is real apprehension that AI will increase income disparity across many jobs and professions—especially teachers. These issues are legitimate (and frightening) and need to be addressed. But depending on who you ask, AI either is or isn’t likely to replace teachers in the near future.

Bill Gates famously remarked that AI is on the brink of being just as good as teachers at the work of teaching (and for some, implying that we’re soon to be replaced), but he would say that. Gates has invested billions into his own ideas about how education should be and likely wants to see a return on his investment–an issue that raises questions of ethics in its own right.

Frankly, it’s difficult to find balanced resources on the topic of AI’s impact on education. On the one hand, the rapid and sudden growth of the technology has left little time to properly study it and its impact. On the other, there are, sadly, many who feel that educators do not serve a productive purpose in society and are champing at the bit to see something—anything—put us out of our jobs. That said, I found the Welcome to AI in Education podcast to be well-rounded and informative. Most episodes are under an hour long. The hosts are tech experts and Microsoft employees (the affiliation with Microsoft should be noted), but I appreciate their expertise, and they deliver an informed and objective take on how tech, and specifically AI, has impacted schools, as well as the ethics involved.

Another podcast, called TopClass, produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “brings together OECD authors and researchers to explain and explore emerging education data and deliver objective insights on education practices worldwide” according to their website. Their episode on AI also offers a well-rounded take on how issues around the use of AI impact education.

Finally, while not a podcast, this interview of Peter Stone, university professor and AI expert, offers a measured take on how tech has impacted the classroom at large and points out that calculators never replaced “the role of human teachers in math classrooms.” According to Stone, who taught a graduate course on ethical AI and robotics, “things like misinformation and impacts on the economy, and all these sorts of things, are very appropriate for K-12 students to be thinking about.” It’s a worthy read and a reminder of how teachers’ responsibilities continue to shift with technology.

UK-based Eton College has its finger to the pulse of how to ethically use AI in classrooms, and I was taken with its description of how teachers were inviting students to chat with an AI-powered version of Isaac Newton about “what people used to think about gravity when he was young.” In a blog post on the topic, the school describes efforts to explore “the various ways AI can enhance teaching and learning in a safe and ethical way,” and this post offers a real-world take on how the latest AI can improve the learning experience by blending history with the here and now.

For those who might need reminders that they’ve been working with AI all along (perhaps without ever realizing it), the University of San Diego online offers a detailed list of 43 examples of Artificial Intelligence in education.

Perhaps all questions centered on AI are inherently questions of ethics, and at the forefront of many teachers’ minds is cheating and plagiarism. While cheating has never been much of an issue in my courses (I’ve dealt with two occurrences in almost two decades,) I do worry a little bit about how the landscape of intellectual integrity might change in the face of tech that makes cheating easier than it has ever been. This interview at NPR (complete with a podcast-style audio component) describes how some educators are tackling ethics by making use of chatbots, with one teacher even requiring it.

And of course there are the age-old plagiarism detectors, which have also evolved to detect ChatGPT use. GPTZero, created by Princeton University student Edward Tian, is self-described as the world’s number-one AI detector and boasts more than 1 million users, but reviews are mixed. According to Jumpstart, an online magazine that covers the world of startups and innovation, “this tool is still in its early stages of development, and educators should not rely solely on it to assess student work. GPTZero acknowledges this itself … urging educators to use it as one of the many tools for grading assignments.”

I am not as concerned with AI’s impact on cheating as I am with its impact on relationships. Having taught at every level at some point in my career, I know the following: Students do not learn from curricular content, they learn from people. Students do not build trust and rapport with curriculum. Curriculum cannot act as role models, but teachers can.

When a child is struggling, parents do not want to speak with language tools driven by AI technology—they want (and need and deserve) to troubleshoot with the human beings who interact with their child on a daily basis. AI has given us (and perhaps has taken away) many things. But the humanity required to navigate intimate human relationships is not something AI will ever be able to replace. We, as a society, may choose to learn this piece the hard way, but as with everything, that depends on us.