AI in the classroom — approach with caution

Teachers and administrators have always been quick to jump on the latest bandwagon because they think that makes them good educators.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t because they often adopt strategies that are quickly proven to be wrong or worse proven to be detrimental to their students. If anyone dares to point out the lack of evidence for the use of the latest gimmick — ChatGPT in the classroom — they are discredited and told that they are not open to new ideas.

I am always skeptical of people like Sinead Bovell who came to speak to educators at the invitation of the Manitoba government at an “AI in education” summit. Her directive was to provide her predications about the future of technology in education. I did not attend this conference but based on what Maggie Macintosh reported in her Free Press article (Future students will be wired differently, thanks to AI, Jan. 16) Bovell told educators that they have to prepare for a future that will include technology in the classroom. The classrooms of today already have more than enough technology in them, so it appears what she was in fact promoting was the use of ChatGPT and other similar AI programs.

Bovell stated that no one knows what the future will look like and in that she is correct.

Educators have always taught for the future without knowing what that future will look like. We prepare our students to be able to face that future secure in the knowledge that they will be able to figure it out as they go along with the tools we provide to them.

That’s all we can hope for and it’s how educators have always operated since formal schooling began. What we do know is that even a future with technology will need people who can read, who can write coherently, who can think for themselves, and who can do basic math. If instructors and students outsource their thinking to artificial intelligence, they will lose those qualities that make them able to function in an uncertain future.

When students use AI to complete assignments, they are outsourcing decision-making to a machine. They don’t want to write an assignment themselves as it takes time away from personal pursuits and because they are not confident in their ability to be able to think for themselves.

But outsourcing decisions comes at a high cost. The cost to education is the deterioration of critical thinking skills for both students and teachers who also rely on AI to write report cards or plan lessons. In my course students have to be able to think before they can write assignments as writing is a decision-making strategy. Without the ability to think, they can’t be successful writers. They have to decide what to include and what to leave out. AI can’t do that.

Outsourcing thinking to AI will lead to people who consume information but do not engage with it. People are quick to accept whatever they read online and to believe social media influencers over experts who are qualified to comment on the topic. Think about all of the fake information that came out about vaccines during Covid and why science was not trusted.

I am reminded of the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley whenever I see yet another article about the use of AI in the classroom. In Huxley’s prediction of the future, he envisioned a society where all of the decisions were being made for the people by a group of controllers. The premise was that the controllers could maintain social stability by providing people with a daily drug that guaranteed they didn’t question anything that they were told to do. This superficial society valued happiness over freedom of thought.

There is a growing group of people in our society who are happy to have their decisions made for them and are happy to follow along with what they are told to do. If we substitute AI for the drug in the book, we are in danger of becoming a society where people can no longer think for themselves. By suppressing critical thinking, today, AI programmers have become the new controllers. They already limit the information that is presented, they skew the information to align with their beliefs, and they seek to punish anyone who thinks differently. Technology is great. I don’t know what I did without Google before. But we have to be cautious when adopting new technology into the classrooms. It is called AI for a reason — it’s artificial and can’t be trusted.

So, when someone like Bovell comes to town and tries to convince her audience that AI is the next best thing to electricity we must remain vigilant in forcing her to provide hard evidence for her views and opinions. I have attended my fair share of conferences and discussions that are put forth by people who have never been inside a classroom. It is easy to say something but it is another thing to implement those ideas into the classroom. I ask each teacher in our public schools to rely less on artificial intelligence and instead trust their actual intelligence.

Our students deserve nothing less.

L. K. Soiferman is an instructor in the department of rhetoric at the University of Winnipeg.