With permission from the author, Anne Lutz Fernandez, I am posting the document below with hopes that it will reach an even larger audience than it already has. JH
_________________________
Help Sheet: Resisting AI Mania in Schools
Argument: “Schools need to prepare students for the jobs of the future.”
The skills employers seek haven’t changed much over decades and include a lot of “soft skills” such as initiative, problem-solving, communication, and critical thinking.
Growing research shows using generative AI can degrade these key skills and inhibit learning:
Subjects at MIT using chatGPT in essay-writing showed less brain engagement, "‘underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels'" and became "lazier, often resorting to copy-and-paste.”
A b-school found those using AI tools often had worse critical thinking skills “mediated by increased cognitive offloading." Younger subjects depended more on AI and used less critical thinking.
Another study revealed subjects using ChatGPT used less metacognition and became dependent on it for feedback, which "undermines critical thinking but also risks long-term skill stagnation.”
Reliance on AI "is quietly eroding workers' core skills," with early-career workers most vulnerable. MDs in a study became less accurate, “motivated, less focused, and less responsible" without AI.
A research review showed student overreliance on AI meaningfully hurt "decision-making, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning."
One study showed lowered persistence and performance after just ten minutes of AI use.
Adults engaged in "cognitive surrender -adopting AI outputs with minimal scrutiny, overriding intuition…and deliberation" in a Wharton study, accepting 4 out of 5 wrong answers from AI.
A large UPenn study showed relying on LLMs to summarize information means "shallower knowledge [versus] learning through a standard Google search."
A Brookings report on the risks of AI "offers a surfeit of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity."
We don’t know what the jobs of the future will be. Educators can't predict the specific tech skills employers will want in the years ahead; they are “teachers, not time travellers.” Even Bill Gates doesn't know. Companies don’t know how AI may transform their businesses and 95% of those that have invested in GenAI are so far “getting zero return.” Smartly, many K-12 schools have focused in recent decades on STEM, based on research showing the “fastest-growing fields will require significant math and science preparation,” a broad strategy focused on essential skills that makes far more sense.
Teachers should focus on their mission. Educators don't enter the profession just to churn out workers. They should remain focused on the whole child and challenges that child faces in learning a range of timeless skills, building knowledge, and developing their individual talents and interests. Some (e.g. comp sci teachers) have reasons to work with AI, but it goes against many teachers’ objectives. English teachers, for example, are meant to teach students how to read, think about, and discuss texts; conduct sound research; analyze rhetoric and literature; and express themselves in writing. History professor Cate Denial says, “There is nothing that I ask my students to do in my classes that benefits from being done by generative AI.”
Human intervention—not tech—is the difference maker. . . . The Economist calls ed tech "mostly useless," saying it "doesn’t come close to the minimum threshold for meaningful learning impact.” Shockingly, districts use 3,000 tech tools on average; students use two dozen annually. ATST, nationally, scores in the past decade-plus have disappointed despite enormous K-12 ed tech spending, forecast to grow to $132 billion in 2032 in part due to AI mania.
Argument: “AI is a tool, just like a calculator.”
Calculators don’t provide factually wrong answers, but AI tools have. Google’s AI search has returned, among other falsehoods, that cats have gone to the moon, Barack Obama is Muslim, and glue goes on pizza. Even though AI tools could improve, children shouldn’t be used as guinea pigs for undertested, unregulated products while AI firms engage politicians in resisting regulation. A BBC study found that though chatbots had improved re news queries, "45% of all AI chatbot answers had at least one significant issue with accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context." They aren't even good calculators, giving wrong answers to everyday math questions 40% of the time.
Calculators don’t provide dangerous, even deadly feedback. In a study, a ”chatbot recommended a user, who said they were in addiction recovery, take a ‘small hit’" of methamphetamine” because, it said, it’s “‘what makes you able to do your job to the best of your ability.’" One study showed chatbots returned "problematic" responses to health and medical queries half of the time.
Calculators don’t pose social and mental health risks. They aren’t potentially addictive and don't encourage repeated use by flattering, directing, or manipulating. Chatbots have been designed this way—leading to some bad mental health outcomes. 1 in 5 high schoolers have had a romantic relationship with AI or know someone who has. Users have received threats from chatbots. And children are more likely to see AI as sentient. Alleging a chatbot urged their teen to suicide, parents in Florida filed suit against its maker.
Calculators don’t lie. Chatbots, though, often mislead. Amanda Guinzburg asked one to describe her essays. It spewed out invented material because it hadn’t even accessed them. After much prodding, the chatbot “admitted” it had only acted as though it had done the requested work, spit out mea culpas—and went on to “lie” again. Chatbots may get worse at this as they've "moved away from declining to answer questions.”
Calculators can’t be used to spread propaganda. AI tools, though, including those meant for schools, should worry us. Law professor Eric Muller’s back-and-forth with SchoolAI’s “Anne Frank” character showed his “helluva time trying to get her to say a bad word about Nazis.” With increasing government censorship and rising influence of tech moguls on government policy and spending, AI tools have great potential as propaganda. Elon Musk, e.g., has retrained his AI chatbot Grok to reflect his extreme views.
Calculators can’t violate children’s privacy. Many AI products marketed to schools and teachers “do not sufficiently protect students’ personal data,” according to Chalkbeat, which states that with “robust training” for teachers, children’s privacy can be safe, though training is often lacking. Laws require schools to protect some information, but that is not reassuring when data breaches, including in school districts, are common.
Using calculators more doesn't create worse outcomes. Schools in which teachers and students use AI more, though, often have higher "exposure to data breaches, troubling interactions between students and AI and AI-generated deepfakes, or manipulated videos or photos that can be used to sexually harass and bully students." Using AI may also "degrade long-term misinformation detection abilities."
The work a calculator does is different from the work chatGPT does. John Warner says, “A calculator doing long division…is not robbing students of experiences that they must do over and over again to continue to learn. The same is not true of AI like ChatGPT and writing.” Students using genAI to help with math homework have been found to do worse on exams, meaning their learning isn't durable.
A far better analogue: a smartphone. More states and schools are restricting or banning phones in classrooms—once touted as an encyclopedia in a kid’s pocket— because they can be addictive and impede attention, engagement, learning. It doesn’t seem adults should have to learn the lesson twice and so soon: let a technology proliferate in schools by ignoring its risks until well after harm is done. As MIT's Nataliya Kosmyna explains, "You don't fall asleep and wake up with a calculator. You don't talk to the calculator about everything you have in your mind."
Argument: “AI won’t replace teachers, but it will save time and improve their effectiveness.”
Adding edtech does not necessarily save teachers time.
A study found learning management systems sold to schools since the 2010s as time-savers (e.g. Canvas) tend to be burdensome and contribute to burnout.
Software developers in one study who used AI tools took 19% more time to do their work, but because they expected to save time, they believed their work had been sped up by 20%. This gap suggests self-reported time savings from AI are suspect.
One study found workers using more genAI had "a significant increase in work hours and a decrease in leisure time." Another study by HBS reported that AI added to workloads and intensified pressure.
“Extra time” is rarely returned to teachers. Teachers are told to use AI tools to grade, prep lessons, or produce materials to have more time with students. But there are always new initiatives, duties, or assignments—the unpaid work districts rely on—to eat that promised time. In a culture of austerity, teachers are likely to be given more students, and when class sizes grow, students get less attention.
AI can’t replace what teachers do, but that doesn’t mean teachers won’t be replaced.
Arizona approved a charter school in which students spend mornings working with AI and the role of teacher is reduced to “guide.” AI-driven schools like this one are spreading across the US.
Ed tech expert Neil Selwyn argues those “hostile to the idea of expensively trained expert professional educators who have [tenure], pension rights and union protection…[welcome] AI replacement as a way of undermining the status of the professional teacher.”
Tech firms have been selling schools untested products for years. Technophilia has led to students on screens for hours in school even when phones are banned. Jess Grose explains, “Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into…schools.” AI appears to be no different. Schools are spending haphazardly on AI tools.
Efficiency is not effectiveness. “Speed and efficiency are not educational values…When it comes to learning, what matters is the learning. We [can't] fall into the trap of privileging speedier outcomes.” Many AI tools focus on product rather than process or provide shortcuts for key processes like brainstorming, outlining, or discussion. One of the few controlled studies of high schoolers showed students using AI tutors did worse after they were removed than students who didn't use them at all.
Novelty doesn’t mean effectiveness. Effective teachers possess a constellation of dispositions, knowledge, and skills; tech skills are just one. The best collaborate with colleagues and parents and “foster positive relationships with students and create a motivating and supportive classroom,” deeply human things. They use “evidence-based practices.” AI tools have not been proven effective while much has been wasted on ineffective edtech. An obsession with the new hasn’t served schools well.
AI could de-skill veteran and novice teachers. Research has shown skill degradation in other fields: endoscopists who regularly used AI to help in colonoscopies became less skilled at detecting polyps. Using AI "to complete tasks that require a new skill," one study showed, "reduces skill formation."
AI mania is moving professional development away from areas where there is deep evidence of effective strategies. The focus of much PD now is AI proficiency, an enormous ask when, as Dan McQuillan says, engineers “admit that no-one really knows what's going on inside these models…we're in the midst of a giant social experiment that pivots around a technology whose inner workings are unpredictable and opaque.”
Successful schools have qualities that AI use threatens. As Boston University researchers explain, AI systems "erode expertise, short-circuit decision-making, and isolate...They are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose..."
Argument: “Students are already using AI, so we have to teach them ethical use."
If schools want ethical students, teach ethics. More students are using AI tools to cheat, an age-old problem made much easier. This won’t be addressed by showing students how to use AI, an argument implying students don’t know what plagiarism is (solved by teaching about plagiarism) or understand academic integrity (solved by teaching and enforcing its bounds)—or that teachers create weak assignments. The latter isn't solved by attempting to redirect students motivated and able to cheat.
Students can be educated on the ethics of AI without encouraging use of AI tools. They can be taught, via media literacy and social media safety programs, about AI’s potential as well as how it can enable predation, perpetuate bias, and spread disinformation. They should be taught the risks of AI and its social, economic, and environmental costs. Giving a nod to these issues while integrating AI throughout schools sends a strong message: the schools don’t really care and neither should students.
Children can’t be expected to use AI responsibly when adults aren’t. Many pushing schools to embrace AI don’t know much about it. One example: Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who said kindergartners should be taught A1 (a steak sauce). The LA Times introduced a biased and likely politically-motivated AI feature. The Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list including nonexistent books—yet teachers are told to use the same tools to do similar work. Educators using AI to cut corners can strike students as hypocritical.
The many costs of AI call into question the possibility of ethical AI use. These include:
Energy - AI data centers need huge amounts of water as well as electricity, pulling these resources from their communities—which tend to be lower-income—straining the grid, and raising household costs. "Wholesale electricity costs have risen as much as 267% in areas near U.S. data hubs." AI water use is especially alarming as climate change creates droughts and wildfires across the US. For these reasons and more, communities are increasingly adverse to data centers.
Environment - Goldman Sachs calculates “a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search.” Data center energy use will jump over the next few years; on behalf of AI, Google has abandoned its goal of carbon neutrality. By 2028, AI “could generate the same emissions as driving over 300 billion miles.” Emissions are only one of AI’s environmental impacts, but are the most threatening to the future for children as "AI’s modeled effects increase the carbon intensity of the global economy and reinforce fossil fuel incumbency."
Health - In addition to the health effects of worsening climate change, AI is producing air pollution that causes cancer, asthma, other diseases, and premature deaths. “The public health burden by 2030 is expected to…rival that of all the cars, buses and trucks in California.”
Equity - Kids are vulnerable to the racial and gender bias found across AI tools for policing, health care, and education. Biased algorithms can present material reinforcing stereotypes. Many AI firms “establish policies that tend to ignore controversial topics…or otherwise water down the responses. The result is a potential rewriting of historical events in inaccurate and inappropriate ways.”
Labor - Workers are exploited: “GenAI training tasks are also fueled by millions of underpaid workers who perform repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions.” It is trained without payment on the “scraped” work of intellectuals and creatives. While AI will create new jobs, perhaps 92 million could be lost, leading to disrupted lives, with disproportionate harm to people of color and low wage earners. The beneficiaries will be the world’s richest people, worsening income inequality and weakening the power of unions and working people—including teachers and students graduating into the world of work.
Economy - Underregulated overinvestment in AI is fueling an investment bubble that some economists are likening to the dot.com bubble or the lead-up to the Great Recession, threatening children's financial futures.
Anne Lutz Fernandez taught English in public secondary schools for more than 20 years. She is the author of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives and Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change.
No comments:
Post a Comment