What does AI Mean for Education?
A post by Christine Elgersma on the CommonSense Media Education blog identifies some issues of concern for educators.
Current Concerns
As technology evolves and becomes more sophisticated, it's understandable that we're uneasy about actual and anticipated challenges. Here are some current concerns:
- Plagiarism
- One of the biggest worries for teachers is plagiarism. Already, students are handing in AI-generated essays as their own.
- Ethics
- Because AI tools scrape content from a wide variety of sources, the material produced is a mixture of many other people's work, and there's no credit for creators.
- Biases and misinformation
- AI can only learn from its source(s), so it takes on the biases, misinformation, and problematic content of the original material. And if the team of developers isn't representative, it's almost guaranteed that implicit bias will be woven into the framework of the tool, as facial recognition has illustrated.
Elgersma, Christine. (2023, 14 February). ChatGPT and Beyond: How to Handle AI in Schools. CommonSense.org. https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/chatgpt-and-beyond-how-to-handle-ai-in-schools?j=9274924&sfmc_sub=170419599&l=2048712_HTML&u=213504902&mid=6409703&jb=17001&utm_source=edu_nl_2023.3.7&utm_medium=email
Video on AI Bias
The following video demonstrates how bias can enter machine learning, and how media literacy can help us remember that when we teach machines how to learn, they can sometimes repeat our own mistakes.
Google. (2017, August 25). 3 Types of Bias in AI [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/59bMh59JQDo?si=jooSIRVwDi_ehSWP
- UNESCO's AI in EducationArtificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and ultimately accelerate the progress towards SDG 4. However, these rapid technological developments inevitably bring multiple risks and challenges, which have so far outpaced policy debates and regulatory frameworks. This publication offers guidance for policy-makers on how best to leverage the opportunities and address the risks, presented by the growing connection between AI and education.
- How AI is transforming education at the University of Mississippi“ There is no better place to see the promise and the peril of generative artificial intelligence playing out than in academia. And there's no better place to see how academia is handling the explosion in ChatGPT and its ilk than at Ole Miss.”