AI In Education: A Double-edged Sword

You don’t have to think for yourself; something else does that for you. You don’t have to spend hours reading an important essay or a novel to get a gist of it; something else does that for you.  You don’t have to write a thing, you don’t have to type a word, you just have to give a command. ‘Edit this piece for grammar and consistency and choice of words,’ or ‘give me a summary of so and so text,’ or ‘tell me how to solve this physics problem.’ It gives back the text, sometimes in a language and a style that you had thought you never knew. 

If some dystopic novelists or science fiction writers had predicted the scenario as described above, it has come true now, in schools, colleges and universities. Generative Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT have entered the classrooms and have made students think they can be a better, or alternative, guide to their human teachers.

Ask anything

Give them a project work on any topic, for example, on contemporary Nepali politics (what caused Gen Z uprising in Nepal), or geopolitics (the cold war between the US and China and how it will impact Nepal), or even AI (will AI replace human teachers?) and students will submit works in a neatly typed printed pages with all the requirements—acknowledgements, table of contents, analysis and references. Give them a presentation task on any topic under the sun and they will bring you an impressive body of presentation slides, with relevant designs and images, with irrefutable data.  Ask them to summarise stories by Hemingway or Tolstoy, or to write character analysis and they will dazzle you with answers you had thought they would possibly not write.  

Ask them this too: ‘Did you do this yourself?’ The answer in most cases will be: ‘No, sir, this is AI-generated’, sometimes with an open admission that since AI does nearly everything for you, it is unsmart on your part to waste so much time and energy reading, regurgitating, rationalising and reflecting. 

Teachers from high school to undergraduate and graduate levels have common stories to share: Majority of assignments, term papers and thesis papers submitted by students are AI-made or AI-assisted.  Students today think resorting to AI, trusting it for work and making it do their work, does not amount to breach of academic discipline. So, welcome to the 21st century classrooms of the metros. The pedagogical standards you once considered as hallmark of learning are waning, the norms considered as ethics of learning, and teaching, at one point are fast disappearing. Human teachers, who at time stood as source of knowledge and wisdom in classrooms, risk becoming secondary references.

Your children may not have asked you if the math problems they solved have come right, they may have clicked the image of the work and send to AI tool to ask if the answer was what it was. I have given several tasks to interpret the medical reports—my CT scan report, ECG image, MRI reports—to ChatGPT and in nearly every case, its interpretations, including the recommendations for medication, have come to match with the doctors’ advice. Multiple times I have asked ChatGPT for advice on my child’s health condition, probable causes and possible remedies, multiple times they have said the right thing about it. 

How this scenario will affect and afflict (or enhance) the learning outcomes of this generation, whether it will make our health and education system smarter is anyone’s guess but that AI has emerged as an appendage for the students is no longer a fringe notion. According to  surveys by Campbell Academic Technology Services, as many as 86 per cent students use AI in their studies, with 54 per cent using it weekly and nearly one in four using it daily, primarily for searching for information, checking grammar and improving writing, summarising and paraphrasing documents, creating drafts of essays, reports, and other written assignments, even deriving research ideas.  Other studies put the user percentage at 92 per cent, 82 per cent regularly, and over 60 per cent of them for generating texts.

Prediction

Bill Gates recently predicted that AI will replace doctors and teachers within the next one decade. Brave that new world if his prophecy comes true. But teaching and learning (can’t speak for medicine for lack of knowledge) cannot be just about commanding AI to produce an essay or write answers to the questions you think are important. It has also to be about nurturing and loving students, understanding why they are how they are, empathising with them, a couple of pats on their back, a couple of words of appreciation, reassurance that they can work, succeed and change the world and many more. 

Will AI do that too? How can teachers cope with the AI interference in students' learning? Can they harness the AI deluge for enhancing their efficiency in teaching, planning, testing and evaluating? Who will teach them how to do so? Let’s start a conversation on how AI has ruptured traditional teaching and learning and whether, like students have started, teachers can also make the most out of it. Whether they should adapt to it or resist it.

 (The author is a journalist and educator based in Kathmandu.)