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Artificial Intelligence: AI: AI and Education

ACON 2023

  1. What challenges will AI bring to student learning?
  2. What opportunities might AI bring to student learning?
  3. Going forward, what are three concrete action items that the Academy can take in relation to AI?

How might AI affect art education?

How does new tech affect student learning? Teaching? How will it change education? If AI is capable of generating unique content, how can teachers advocate for academic honesty and make it necessary? What are the cultural and historical implications of AI? How does AI compare to other paradigm shifts in art history, such as the advent of photography and digital media? What skills might we lose as individuals by relying on AI? What skills might we gain?

Pro AI in Education

To Teach Better Writing, Don’t Ban Artificial Intelligence. Instead, Embrace it. (EducationNext)

  • We put OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the test by asking it to write essays in response to real school curriculum prompts. We then submitted those essays for evaluation. The results show that ChatGPT produces responses that meet or exceed standards across grade levels. This has big implications for schools, which should move with urgency to adjust their practices and learning models to keep pace with the shifting technological landscape.

  • . . . blocking ChatGPT is not only futile, but also counterproductive for students who will be forced to use this tool and others like it in a working world where they are ubiquitous. By rethinking classroom practices and restructuring learning models, schools can give students the tools, guidance, and incentives to grow their writing skills in the age of artificial intelligence.

  • Technologists predict that numerous professions – including those requiring advanced skills – will leverage ChatGPT in their day-to-day work in the near future. Lawyers will look to the chatbot instead of their more junior colleagues to create summaries of case notes and relevant laws. Journalists will use it to generate checklists of points to cover for articles on given topics. In these professional use cases, it will be critical for workers to accurately evaluate ChatGPT’s output and put it to effective and ethical use. The best place and time for a worker of tomorrow to learn how to do that is in a classroom today.

Con AI in Education

AI Will Transform Teaching and Learning. Let’s Get it Right. (Stanford)

By the time the summit was held on Feb. 15, [2023] ChatGPT had reached more than 100 million unique users, and 30% of all college students had used it for assignments, making it one of the fastest-ever applications ever adopted overall – and certainly in education settings. 

  1. Model output does not reflect true cultural diversity: At present, ChatGPT and AI more broadly generates text in language that fails to reflect the diversity of students served by the education system or capture the authentic voice of diverse populations. When the bot was asked to speak in the cadence of the author of The Hate U Give, which features an African American protagonist, ChatGPT simply added “yo” in front of random sentences. As Sarah Levine, assistant professor of education, explained, this overwhelming gap fails to foster an equitable environment of connection and safety for some of America’s most underserved learners.
  2. Models do not optimize for student learning: While ChatGPT spits out answers to queries, these responses are not designed to optimize for student learning. As Liang noted, the models are trained to deliver answers as fast as possible, [not] . . . a more in-depth explanation of key concepts or a framing that is more likely to spark curiosity to learn more.
  3. Incorrect responses come in pretty packages: Goodman demonstrated that AI can produce coherent text that is completely erroneous. 
  4. Advances exacerbate a motivation crisis: . . . many students may no longer know what they should be focusing on or don’t see the value of their hard-earned skills. 

The full impact of AI in education remains unclear at this juncture, but as all speakers agreed, things are changing, and now is the time to get it right.