It has gotten to a point where a teacher’s biggest fear isn’t Wikipedia or Google, but finding the entirety of a student’s work being made by a robot. Welcome to the massively-debated topic of AI’s value not just in our increasingly automated society, but in education.
Where Google has become a thing of yesterday and ChatGPT is becoming a thing of tomorrow, students are now learning to maneuver their responses and pull answers out of AI programs.
Mr. Brewczynski, a computer science and math teacher, said, “AI is revolutionizing the way people do work and live their lives. It’s taking a bunch of things people have to do off their plate, so it’s making us more efficient.”
Similarly, Mr. Bickham, an entrepreneurship and personal finance teacher, highlighted his astonishment over the rise of AI. “As soon as I was introduced to the capabilities of ChatGPT, messing around with it about a year or two years ago, I was blown away by it. I think teachers are the early adopters of AI because it’s just right in our face and our students use it.”
According to a blog post by PowerSchool, a K-12 cloud-based software company, “Meanwhile, AI offers limitless opportunities. These include new forms of interaction—which can be particularly groundbreaking for special education programs and multilingual learners—to facilitate communication, personalized learning adaptations, improved feedback loops, and individualized tutoring with ‘study buddies’ are just a few ways that AI is transforming the K-12 landscape.”
Mr. Irvin, a social studies teacher, said, “Any kind of technological advancement is going to provide different ways of doing things. I can always see it changing the ways people work, so it is changing workflow for sure. People are finding ways to cut some of the things they do that typically have to be done by an individual.”
However, for something recently introduced to the public, AI usage has been widely debated by schools, employers, and users internationally. Teachers find that regulation of AI is necessary and that students don’t realize that AI programs not only stop learning–but sometimes harm it.
“What will happen is students will start plugging in questions to AI that aren’t necessarily research, but opinion. For example, they will put in, ‘What do you think is the most significant cause of the civil war?’ It’ll give them an answer to that, but now it’s replacing critical thinking. So students no longer have to come up with their own opinion – it’s the AI’s opinion. That is going to take the place of critical thinking and independent thought. So there’s this fine line between using it as a research paper, versus using AI to basically form opinions, which all of a sudden now can be dangerous. Now students ask ‘what do you believe’ and someone will say ‘AI told me this is what i have to believe,” Mr. Irvin stated.
Mr. Geiger, a psychology teacher, stated, “At least what I’ve seen is that it takes away the research ability and having the motivator to find the answer, and puts it more on the tool instead. It’s helpful, but it’s also the opposite, where it’s taking away that technique to go and find your own data and collect those topics and research. It’s hard to prevent students from plagiarizing using AI as your sole research tool, so you basically have to try to encourage them.”
An article published in October by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign showcased the positive and negative sides of AI. They discussed the decrease in human interaction, stating, “Relying more and more on AI may reduce the teacher-to-student interactions and relationships and take away from the social-emotional aspects of learning. If those interactions diminish, students’ social skills and interpersonal development will suffer. Teachers need to be aware of this and take care to identify and respond to the social and emotional needs of their students.”
AI’s usage in creative fields and studies is also a new discussion in education. Especially in electives that require students to channel their artistry, AI has been a controversial tool.
Mr. Gonzalez, an art teacher, stated, “With my other classes that are more [at the] beginning level, I do show them how AI can be used to create reference images. So instead of copying an image from Google or using a magazine to come up with an image, they can describe what they want in AI and come up with their own piece that they can use as a reference. It depends on the intent. [If a student is] learning how to use watercolor paints, and then using AI to come up with a source to paint from…in my class, it’s ok. We’re still at the beginning term point of it [using AI], and it’s going to keep changing and evolving. We have to figure out how to deal with it down the road.”
Teachers, having seen the rise of both the internet and now AI, had to adapt new ways to detect AI to maintain academic integrity. But just the originality of the work is not enough.
“How do we use these different tools responsibly? That’s something that–I’ll be honest–I think this is going to have to be something that is addressed earlier and earlier in a student’s education. So I think that because it’s emerging, it should be shown to juniors and seniors, but this is a conversation that should probably be coming up like freshman year, something that we talk about in terms of advisory. And it’s something that should probably be discussed at the junior high level,” Mr. Irvin said.
No matter the amount of concerns that come with AI, it has an increasingly prevalent impact on not just education but in the prfoessional world.
“My mind always goes to law–I don’t know why my mind always goes back [there]. So much of what a lawyer does is paperwork and contracts. AI, I think, could start doing all of that stuff. I think that’s a career that I think is going to be greatly impacted. Whether we’ll replace lawyers, I don’t know. But the amount of time and work that could be saved by lawyers… AI has a huge value for a career like that. I have a concern about AI replacing human jobs; that makes me a little nervous,” Mr. Bickham stated.
“My suspicion is that what will happen is certain jobs will disappear and certain jobs will be created as a result. It just changes the kinds of work people do, instead of how many things there are for people to do,” Mr. Brewzynski noted.
All teachers agree that no matter the stance of AI in education, it will become more developed and more dominant in the future. This rapid advancement will likely reshape how students learn and how educators teach.
“I think there are things that are going to come out of AI that I don’t even see coming. I’m pretty into the AI thing and I’m a big supporter and investor, but we’re at the tip of the iceberg. Twenty years from now, maybe I will have a robot who cleans after me and does my dishes afterward. Who knows where this is all going to go? I think there’s a whole world of possibilities ahead of us with AI and robotics that’s still going to have a major impact on our lives,” Mr. Bickham stated.
“I’m sort of the belief that AI is going to let us do things that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do. We’ll just have more information to make more informed decisions about all types of things,” Mr. Brewzynski said.
AI has become an important part of today’s society and education systems are still trying to figure out ways to maintain both AI and student integrity as it develops. The debate about AI usage in classrooms is subjective to each teacher, administrator, parent, and student, but AI’s influence on education is undoubtedly one that will change how students learn and grow in the classroom.