What impact will artificial intelligence have on education?
The growing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) software, capable of generating images, sound and even text in a matter of seconds, is opening up a debate on technological transformation. In this February 2023 image, a teacher in A Coruña, Spain, gives a lesson in a classroom where technology, for the time being without artificial intelligence, is ubiquitous.
The growing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) programmes, which have shown themselves increasingly capable in recent months of generating images, videos, music, computer programming code and even texts of all kinds in a matter of seconds, producing seemingly appropriate and coherent results, in many instances – and in many others, not – is arousing fascination and concern all over the world, especially among artists and creators.
What the AI tools of today can do is, at times, so spectacular and convincing that it is hard not to think it must be the work of a conscious being that comprehends what is being asked of it and understands what it produces in response. This is clearly not the case, but for the public at large it suddenly seems like we are witnessing the sudden emergence of revolutionary technology, full of potential and promise but also perils that could transform our world.
This day may come, but it is further away than the flurry of expectation may lead us to think. What has happened in recent months, above all, is that the current technology, quite widespread and known to all researchers who had hitherto been experimenting with it behind closed doors, has suddenly started to see the light of day, not only with a view to introducing it to the public, arousing interest and attracting investors, but also so that the programmes could benefit from interacting with people and be ‘trained’ by millions of requests and users at the same time, a massive amount of activity and information that no company could otherwise secure for their AIs.
Last year, text-to-image generators such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion or Dall-E were already beginning to catch the attention of thousands of new and curious users around the world, but the debate reached much greater heights with the public release in December 2022 of a similar programme that generates text: ChatGPT by the company OpenAI. The results delivered within seconds can be so coherent that, in many instances, they appear to have been written by a human being.
At 94, Noam Chomsky, the father of contemporary linguistics, who has closely followed the entire history of AI to this day, cautioned, in January 2023, that ChatGPT is irreparably flawed in that it gives the same value to information that makes sense in the actual world as to information that does not, because it cannot distinguish between the two or understand it. He argued that it does not, therefore, seem to be making any engineering or scientific contributions “except maybe helping some student fake an exam or something”.
From one day to the next, old student antics such as copying entire paragraphs from Wikipedia have indeed been rendered obsolete by technology that, with little effort, does the same job more creatively and more convincingly, in a matter of seconds. Are our educators prepared for the task of incorporating the existence of AI into our classrooms and our lives?
Equal Times spoke to Spanish researcher José F. Morales, who has first-hand knowledge of the subject, both as a professor of computational logic and as a member of the Artificial Intelligence Department at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and the IMDEA Software Institute. In his view, the emergence of this technology as it stands today “won’t be very disruptive” and “if ChatGPT were introduced in schools tomorrow, it would probably lead to a lot of time wasting without offering any comparative advantage over studying with a good book”.
