Thinking Critically about Artificial Intelligence and Education [Updated]

Update: At the end of the article, we add useful readings published recently that support and expand on this publication.

[Originally published on 07/04/2023]

At the beginning of the 20th century, and shortly after its discovery, the chemical element radium – very expensive to extract – was included even in the wool of baby clothes. Thanks to advances in science and research we currently use it only in beneficial applications and stay away from its radioactive effects. Ever since tools like ChatGPT have become available online, the same that happened with the discovery of radium is now happening with Artificial Intelligence (AI): it is becoming a necessity everywhere.

The current AI hype seeks to normalize its use in our societies so those who produce it can make huge profits as fast as possible. Although hype is common practice, the ways in which AI impacts Education lead us to commit to work constructively and responsibly, with a local perspective and respecting our values.

In this blog post, we share some critical thoughts and ideas about the potential uses of AI in Education. In this related post, we share a number of questions that we recommend you ask yourself each time you see the AI buzz around Education.

💭 Critical Reflections

Latin American educators – with the resources – have been exploring new ways to integrate into their practices technologies such as ChatGPT, an irresponsible tech disruption at the finger tips of any person with Internet access. However, having enough resources for teaching in Latin America has been the exception rather than the rule for decades. Most teachers face precarious employment conditions and burnout, which have been neglected for years. Common student issues include unmet basic needs such as food, housing, or the violence that stems from their absence. In such context, it is reasonable to slow down the adoption of disruptive solutions promoted by tech business people endorsed by Northern Hemisphere high-income countries’ leadership.

We have much to worry about in Latin America before considering the systematic use of Artificial Intelligence in Education. For decades, public, accessible, and high-quality Education has faced waves of precariousness and “modernization” of its programs and teaching methods to serve profit motives for only a few. Fortunately, there are always defenders of critical thinking from commercial interests. That does not mean ignoring or rejecting technology, but rather discussing its responsible, gradual application, respecting people’s sovereignty, and envisioning its effects in the short, medium, and long term.

In addition, some of these “modernizing” tools are aimed at vulnerable populations who do not have access to the technological resources and support required to implement these technologies in proper teaching-learning processes. We have seen many information technology tools for education initiatives in Latin America, from robotics classes to “one laptop per child” projects. These experiences taught us that they must be contextualized to each community and sustained by several generations of students and teachers to affect fundamental change.

Each Latin American country has its own socioeconomic dynamics, with profound differences between public and private education. Technology, whether with chatbots or any piece of software or hardware, must reach those contexts as a tool for citizenship instead of deepening social inequalities.

🔎 Yet To Be Investigated Potential

As teachers, we know that our daily work has different categories of tasks. Many of them are performed by interacting with our students – for example, during class, during office hours, or while taking care of a personal situation for a student. Other duties do not involve contact with our students, e.g. preparing a lesson plan, writing exams, or providing written feedback to students. Tasks such as correcting the same written exam error, submitting final grades, and transferring data between formats in different institutional systems can be repetitive. AI tools could be helpful to automate some of them. Automation like this could free up time to learn more and better engage with our students, since we could always use more time to dedicate to the teacher-student relationship. The tasks involved in building the relationship with our students cannot be automated. We should always investigate the harms and benefits of AI before deploying them in Education.

Any AI implementation often raises valid concerns about the consequences for instructors’ working conditions. Automating teaching tasks through AI to reduce teaching hours and lower educational costs would be a serious mistake and yet a new jab at Education. Teachers will still be essential and remain responsible for tasks automated by AI, independent of how much AI advances, because AI tools cannot assume responsibility. Implementing AI is not a valid excuse for lowering teacher salaries or the demand for teachers. When evaluating the impact of AI on instructors’ working conditions, it should never be harmful.

Furthermore, some of the advertising for AI tools for Education promises to personalize educational processes to a level prohibitive in the traditional teaching system due to the high costs of individualized instruction. Personalized education improves learning processes because explanations and exercises focus on individual needs and because personalized attention improves the teacher-student relationship. Would it be possible to use AI to give that kind of customized help? Do we want to delegate that task entirely to an AI tool? It is true that, for example, there are AI algorithms that can assist instructors in choosing practice exercises for students who find a topic too difficult. However, even for algorithms as simple as this one, AI systems can often systematically harm people who were overlooked at design time. AI tools do discriminate, and that is a critical issue. For example, suppose a Spanish-speaking student is learning to program and their teacher uses an AI tool to get recommendations for programming exercises. If the system was designed for English-speaking students, it would likely make worse suggestions for the Spanish-speaking student.

🥁 A Closing Declaration

As we teach at MetaDocencia, Education is a social process that does not magically improve overnight with the introduction of any technology. Moreover, there is no universal solution for every context. Indeed AI, like radium, can bring benefits to our lives. It still remains to further explore these benefits and how to implement them well in Education. Such change must be democratic, honoring humans and our timing, and not because a handful of business people with accelerated profit motives want to impose their needs and solutions on us.

It is always better to prioritize people over tech tools. New AI tools generate enormous wealth for a few people and greater inequality for the rest of humanity. This is discussed further in the “ Montevideo Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and its Impact in Latin America,” where more than 400 experts, mainly from Latin America, began to warn about this in March of 2023. We invite you to sign the Declaration and, above all, continue thinking critically. Whenever you see buzz about AI tools in Education, ask yourself some of the questions we shared in our other post titled “ Artificial Intelligence and Education: More Questions Than Answers”.

📖 Further Readings

• Miao, F. and Holmes, W. Guidance for generative AI in education and research. Published by UNESCO. September, 2023.
• UNESCO: Governments must quickly regulate Generative AI in schools. September, 2023.
• Higher education’s essential role in preparing humanity for the artificial intelligence revolution. A statement to be issued by a diverse group of educators and scholars at the 18th annual United Nations lnternet Governance Forum, October 2023, Kyoto, Japan.

Did you like this post? You can reuse it freely under CC by 4.0 license. Just cite it!

Here is the citation we recommend you use:

Laura Ación, Luciana Benotti, Melissa Black, Laura Ascenzi, & Paola Andrea Lefer. (2023). Thinking Critically about Artificial Intelligence and Education. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8120652.