It's undeniable that AI has become a central topic in education. As a piece of emergent technology, its potential is staggering for both educators and students. However, despite the continuous discussion on its potential utility and misuse, I rarely see people talk about how AI actually operates. That's why I aim to spread some awareness about AI and its many intricacies in this post. I am hardly the leading expert, and I admit that there are many things I don't fully understand either, but I hope to at least shed some light on the enigma that is AI and maybe inspire my readers to conduct their own research. Let's start with...
Artificial Intelligence is a myth. Now, this is a bit of an exaggeration. AI obviously exists since we use it. However, it may not exist in the way that you imagine it. The way AI is portrayed in popular media has always been sentience; an advanced machine becomes able to think and act on its own accord, cue robots taking over the world. The AI that we have become so familiar with is quite different. In the real world, AI does not have sentience or consciousness. It does not think or feel, no matter how convincing of an essay it can produce on any topic. By that same metric, it cannot create anything original, either.
AI can only change what already exists. Since AI cannot have original thoughts, it must form its output based on existing information. Fortunately(or unfortunately), it has access to the greatest collection of data and information in history: the internet. When you ask AI whether or not you should eat a carrot, it surges through the internet, finding any information it can on carrots. Nutritional values, common recipes, anything is fair game. It then spits that information back out to you, with the grammar and language structure it copies from countless pieces of blog posts or comments made by other humans. Even when you ask AI to help you come up with new ideas, it can only look for information with a "new idea" label and return that to you. AI is extremely efficient at finding that information, but that's all it can do.
So why does this matter? Why is it important to understand how AI works? Despite only being an elaborate pattern recognition machine, AI has become scarily powerful. The best example is GenAI, or generative AI. This is an umbrella term for AI that can create "new" content such as text, code, images, or videos. While we may use GenAI to make lesson plans, people have already used it to conduct scams in video calls, or worse, generate inappropriate content of others without consent. As AI becomes more powerful, it will become virtually impossible to distinguish real content from AI content. Thus, our role as educators is to teach responsible use and digital literacy to our students. Remember that not everything you see online is real, and interact online in a way that does not put you at risk. To that end, I believe using AI in classrooms should not just be encouraged, but mandatory. It is better for students to be exposed to this technology in a safe environment, and much worse for them to use it without guidance or remaining unaware of it. When I think about what AI can do, a few plagiarized assignments seem like less of a concern.
Now, please keep in mind what I said at the start of the post. I am not the leading expert on AI, and I don't claim to know every nuance of how AI works or will change. If any of what you read made you think, I highly recommend you look into AI yourselves and come to your own conclusions. I would like to leave you with a TED talk about AI. Please check it out if you're interested. Thank you for reading, and may the tides of history wash gently over us all.
JerryL@NUO
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