Next here Decoderwe talked a lot about generative artificial intelligence, which is a very significant idea and causes a lot of problems. One of the things we keep hearing about is that generative AI is causing a lot of problems in schools.
Many people, including many of us listening to this show who email us, are concerned about an obvious problem: students are using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments – and yes, some students are definitely doing it.
But as our team dug deeper into the story, we discovered that the problems with artificial intelligence in education go much deeper and into the philosophy of education itself.
The Decoder the team spoke to many teachers — you’ll hear many of their voices in this episode — and from many of them we heard one common theme: Who are we, anyway? act Here?
As one instructional designer will tell you: “If this technology becomes more ubiquitous, we will have courses created by AI, graded by AI, with student input completely generated by AI. So the question becomes: what are we even doing here in higher education?”
Every teacher has different experiences with AI in the classroom and with their students, but the common thread is that many of these experiences feel bad. Several teachers who spoke to us said that tools like ChatGPT facilitate them in their work, but the huge majority are faced with deep existential questions.
Fortunately, there are people whose job it is to be experts in education and educational technology to further investigate what is going on. So I met with Dr. Adam Dubé from McGill University to talk about how generative artificial intelligence fits into education today and where it might all be heading in the future.
If you want to read more about what we talked about in this episode, check out these links:
Have questions or comments about this episode? Write to us at decoder@theverge.com. We really read every email!