How AI is fueling an existential crisis in education

Here on Decoder, we’ve talked a lot about generative AI, which is a very big idea that is causing quite a few problems. One thing we keep hearing about over and over again is that generative AI is causing a lot of problems in schools.

A lot of people out there — including many of the listeners of this show who email us — are worried about the obvious problem: students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments — and yes, some students definitely do.

But when our team went and poked at the story, we found that the issues with AI in education go a lot deeper, to the very philosophy of education itself.

The Decoder team sat down and talked to a lot of teachers — you’ll be hearing many of their voices throughout this episode — and we kept hearing one common theme echoed from many of them: what are we even doing here?

As one instructional designer you’ll hear says, “If this technology becomes more ubiquitous, we’ll have courses created by AI, graded by AI, with submissions from students absolutely generated by AI. So it begs the question: What are we even doing here in higher ed?”

Every teacher is having a different experience with AI in the classroom, and with their students, but the common thread is that a lot of those experiences feel bad. A few teachers who talked to us find tools like ChatGPT are helping their workflow, but a definite majority are facing those deep existential questions.

Luckily, there are people whose job it is to be experts in education and educational technology, to research what’s going on in a more detailed way. So I sat down with Dr. Adam Dubé, from McGill University, to talk about how generative AI is fitting into education right now, and where all of this might be going in the future.

If you’d like to read more about what we discussed in this episode, check out these links:

• A majority of high school students use gen AI for schoolwork | College Board
• About a quarter of teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork | Pew Research
• Your brain on ChatGPT | MIT Media Lab
• My students think it’s fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they’re on to something. | Vox
• How children understand and learn from conversational AI | McGill University
• ‘File not Found’ | The Verge

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