Do we need a traditional school at a time when artificial intelligence generates a dissertation in seconds? AI is inevitably becoming an essential part of our everyday life and, by extension, of education. The vision of stopping this process seems unlikely.

‘There will be more changes in the world of learning in the next ten years with the help of artificial intelligence than in the last hundred’

Sceptics of normalising the use of artificial intelligence in schools warn that such a solution could lead to the ‘dumbing down of the younger generation’. On the one hand, similar concerns were raised when calculators came on the market in the last century, through which school-aged people were supposed to lose their numeracy skills. As we know, this did not happen. However, the concern raised is not unfounded. A study in Norway showed that the IQ level of the younger generation began to fall by seven percentage points per decade.

‘It used to actually be necessary to remember more. Children need to be trained in the brain and the algorithms that work in it, because that is what intelligence is based on later,’

When we don’t learn to solve complex operations or remember dates, we move from natural memory to artificial memory in computers. In the case of AI, we are not dealing with yet another tool like an improved calculator, but precisely with intelligence, a trait we should be developing at school.

If not intelligence, what other trait will remain autonomous for humans? It has been emphasised that the emotional sphere is one in which technology cannot replace humans. However, here too, AI is finding wider application: it is able to analyse a person’s face and recognise his or her feelings or even political views on this basis.

Artificial intelligence is also becoming an important issue in universities. In a survey conducted by coopernicus.co.uk, around 60 per cent of the students surveyed said they use AI in the course of their studies. It turns out that writing an undergraduate or master’s thesis is not going to be an effective way to test someone’s knowledge, because we don’t have tools that can confront and effectively detect language models. AI detectors are taught to catch text that resembles machine-generated text as much as possible, while models are created more and more ‘humanly’ – Therefore, the former are losing the battle. The solution could be the in-depth study of languages, which gains us knowledge of how humans think and use words. However, AI is also capable of learning this.

Since we are unable to stop the development of artificial intelligence and permanently eliminate it from our reality, it is worth considering how the education system should respond. The first option is to stay with the traditional teaching model, in which teachers play the main role and the use of AI is as limited as possible. Currently, this approach tends to dominate in Poland, exemplified by, for example, regulations introduced by universities setting limits on how far students can use AI when writing their papers. However, the reality is surprising – an Impact Research study showed that 51% of teachers use AI technology and 38% allow students to use it. This is what a second model of education could look like, where students would use AI to facilitate research, for example. The most radical approach would be to replace the role of the teacher with a personalised AI tutor.

The role of the traditional teacher would be reduced to overseeing students’ work and progress. This controversial solution has its advantages: artificial intelligence is better able to analyse our implicit preferences. It can ‘observe’ us holistically and detect even subconscious behaviour in order to select more appropriate content for us. In this respect, AI is being used, for example, to personalise advertising and product sales for us. Such a tutor could be more effective in analysing our learning mode, determining the optimal time for repetition or even advising us on our career choice. The model is not without its flaws. It lacks interpersonal relationships, a large part of which are currently established in schools, between students and teachers. The question also arises as to whether, once we accept that socially relevant professions have been replaced by artificial intelligence, which teachers undoubtedly are, does education even make sense? What in life would it prepare us for?

The entire interview conducted by Coopernicus.pl

Fot. Unsplash

Transcription: Aleksandra Fijałek