My AIBot fears were recently writ large in an article that appeared in the national press.
“In education, the use of ChatGPT is now so widespread that many teachers and academics feel engulfed.”
“With students now cheating the system by using Al to produce essays, it is difficult to assess how capable they really”
“In the private sector, Al is being deployed in call centres and is being stuffed into every conceivable application we use, from Google Calendar to WhatsApp.”
“The human consequences are being overlooked – and these could be profound. Deferring mental work, or “cognitive offloading” as it is known in scientific circles, has many side-effects. These range from individual employees “zoning out” and becoming zombies, to organisation-level effects like the Finnish financial services consultancy losing key skills, to society losing its ability to understand how anything works at all.”
“It’s good to have a degree of struggle when learning This builds long-term memory and the skilled transfer of knowledge from one problem set to another. This is called “desirable difficulty”, a term coined by Dr Robert Bjork in the 1990s”
My concerns were furthered in a post by Oxford University Lecturer #DYLANPRICE who commented,
“But recently, I’ve noticed something concerning with secondary school students I meet:
- An attachment to finding the “right” answer,
- A hesitation to trust their own ideas,
- An increase in anxiety and avoidance in the face of more stretching topics.
This is hardly surprising, given the rigidity of school curricula, and now, an over-reliance on AI. Don’t get me wrong: AI can be an incredible learning tool, and I don’t believe the danger is AI producing better work. BUT there is a VERY real danger in forgetting how to create and think for ourselves…
Now, more than ever, we need to encourage students to move beyond narrow viewpoints, and lean fully into their own curiosity.and be aware if we refuse to believe Al is magic, we’ll be wiser about its obvious and not so obvious flaws. Unfortunately, policymakers in the West have been overtaken by a desire to make machines seem magical. If we’re getting dumber, then we can hardly blame the Al for that. We’ve done it to ourselves