Last spring, As I finished my 18th year of teaching, I felt an anxiety I had never felt before at the end of a school year. When grades are submitted and signs of summer appear, teachers are usually able to breathe for the first time in nine months. Instead of the relaxation, joy, and accomplishment that usually awaits the end of a college year, I was consumed with worry that this might be the last time in my nearly two-decade career that I teach a class without having to worry about AI.
I get it: technically, AI has been around forever, and natural language processing tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are built on decades of research. Anyone who has used spell-checking or translation apps or heard a spoken text message has used language processing tools driven by AI technology. But until now, many teachers I know haven’t really worried about the extent to which AI might infiltrate our classrooms.
Most teachers keep up with technology to a reasonable extent and do their best to teach their students how to use it responsibly. Many view technology as an educational asset, and I have long believed that students are more engaged when their classes make extensive 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 into the mainstream last November, we couldn’t have predicted the impact our work could have.
ChatGPT turned out to be the fastest-growing consumer app in history, reaching 100 million active users just two months after its launch, according to a Reuters report. For context, it took TikTok and Instagram nine months two years to reach the same milestone, according to data from Sensor Tower, a digital data analytics company.
Suddenly, doing my best no longer seemed 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 a good part of this summer learning as much as I can about how AI affects education, students, and classroom spaces. Perhaps more importantly, I will need to get smarter about how to ethically integrate AI into my teaching. It was with these goals in mind that I began a quest 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 days, and there is a real fear that AI will widen income disparities among many jobs and professions, especially teachers. These issues are legitimate (and scary) and need to be addressed. But depending on who you ask, whether or not AI will replace teachers in the near future.
Bill Gates has noted that AI is about to be as good as teachers at the job of teaching (and to some, this implies that we will soon be replaced), but he would be say that. Gates has invested billions in his own ideas about what education should be and probably wants to see a return on his investment – a matter that raises ethical questions in itself.
