August 16, 2023
November 2022 brought another AI disruption on the heels of the last one: ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (GAI) bot that can often out-perform students on common assignments and get 5s on most of the AP exams, immediately became a global sensation, garnering 100 million unique visitors in 2 months. This was just the beginning of a disruption that will not end: GAI is here to stay and its abilities will continue to accelerate, dramatically impacting education and changing the world forever.
The abilities of these bots, which now include representatives from Google, Anthropic, Inflection, and Meta, to produce more content that is becoming more factually correct and authored in the voice of the user will grow. And so will the strength of companies that build on top of their technology to excel at specific tasks, such as writing student papers undetected.
They will also strengthen these bots to reason, perceive situations, solve problems, plan responses, and apply their learning to new situations. These are all common characteristics of human intelligence, and students have already started using these bots as tutors.
Today, we largely think of GAI as text-to-text (the machines writing the papers), but these tools are also starting to generate incredible images, short videos, and 3-D environments. Bot inputs and outputs will become multimodal: combinations of text, voice, image, and video will be used in the input as well as the output. When this occurs seamlessly, full spatial environments that are uniquely suited to each individual’s interests and desires will be easily produced and refined as users interact with them, creating incredible dynamic and interactive environments. We can even see the rudiments of one created by an 11-year-old.
The production of dynamic multimodal environments will be accompanied by the development of bots that progress more and more toward human-level intelligence. They will offer opportunities for machines to perceive situations (such as learner’s needs), respond (develop a plan to meet those needs), and respond again (meet the needs), continually perceiving the individual’s changed situation, iteratively developing responses, and adjusting to meet the new needs of the individual learner. As this happens and the rate of “hallucination,” which refers to the bots stating incorrect facts, declines, we will have fully intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that will support individualized student instruction; this will radically change how schools operate and the rate at which students learn. We are already witnessing major developments related to these companies. At a minimum, this will revolutionize homeschooling.
The world as we know it is about to “fundamentally change.” These changes will transform society, and schools cannot ignore the disruptions created by the development of the AI World (Gates), something Sam Altman refers to as, “the other side,” and expect their students to thrive in it. When will this happen? Leaders in the field (Ilya Sutskever, Emad Mostaque) point to the developments occurring quickly over the course of the next decade, though there is the possibility for radical advances that could significantly accelerate the rate of change.
These combined advancements mean that students who are entering school in the early primary grades and will graduate from high school in 12 years will not only learn differently but they will live in a world that will likely be fundamentally different from the one we are living in now. Doctors and lawyers will work collaboratively with AIs to diagnose patients and support their clients with their own recommended diagnoses and novel legal arguments. Professionals who don’t integrate AI tools may be sued for malpractice. AIs will also likely help design new construction materials and new ways of building. We may be watching news programs whose content is adapted to each viewer and delivered by avatars.
And the students, many of whom will build million-dollar businesses in collaboration with AIs that may be their only “employees,” will likely be driven around by autonomous vehicles before they take driver’s ed.
Before November of 2022, the changes just discussed would seem to be more the subject of conversations about the distant future, but these are changes that we will likely see in the next 3-10 years. And AI is already impacting education, particularly in the area of written assessments. Writing rubrics (explicit or otherwise) assume work is produced by a sole human author, not one that is produced in cooperation with an AI bot or by an AI bot acting on its own. Collaboration between AIs and humans is likely to redefine the future of all writing, just as it will redefine medicine, the law, business, and military operations, and we need new standards for judging expectations related to student writing with co-pilots.
Students who leave schools without the ability to use AI well are unlikely to be employable, and employers are struggling to find qualified candidates, even relaxing college degree requirements in the hopes of finding students with the skills they need in the emerging AI world. AI copiloting is arguably the most important skill a student could learn this academic year. Schools need to prepare to educate students both in and for an AI world, both as employees and as citizens of the republic that understand what these changes mean.
Developing an approach to AI requires more than simply consulting with a CTO about integrating another piece of technology into the school, as these active technologies that will make decisions and be creative are fundamentally different from any piece of technology that has ever been developed in the past. This is not a new printing press, piece of industrial equipment, or even a new computer; those could not operate unless under the explicit direction of humans. These intelligent GAI tools will engage your students, tutor them, do school work designed without them in mind, provide them with feedback, converse with them, distract them, and even (in the context of non-school systems), develop friendships with them. It is more like having another intelligent person in the classroom than another computer, laptop, or iPad. This technology will remake the entire education system, not simply function as a means to enhance existing academic outcomes. Integration into school environments needs to be led by everyone, in cooperation with technology leaders. Students and teachers who learn to use these tools well will not only both save time and improve the quality of their work, but they will also develop essential skills that will serve them well throughout their lifetime.
To successfully help students and faculty navigate the AI world, we suggest these four steps.
- Start by ascertaining the needs of your school community
Begin with open-ended conversations that allow users to voice anything they wish: anger; excitement; frustration; insecurity; dependence. Are they angry that they haven’t received support from the administration? Are they excited about what the future has to offer? Are they frustrated that some people expected them to spend their summers learning about AI? Do they just assume the school tech person will fix this? Are they worried about their jobs? What is their current ability to use active AI in the classroom? We know from the recent Global Education Monitoring Report that the rate of technological change is causing significant stress among educators. The transition to the AI world will be disruptive and it is essential that you engage your students and faculty on the issue in an empathetic way.
- Develop AI literacy
In order to both make decisions about AI, orient schools to a world of AI, and live productively in an AI world, students and faculty need an honest and current understanding of what current AI tools can and cannot do, what they will likely be able to do over the next two academic years, the role of AI in the current world and how it will develop in the future, including how it might impact jobs, equality, and even democracy. This means providing staff and students with the opportunities to become AI literate, but estimates indicate that only 11 percent of schools offer professional development on AI. These programs already exist and can be easily implemented in your school, both live and online.
- Consider curriculum and assessment changes
While we don’t know exactly what the “other side,” will look like, we know that reliance on short essays, written responses, and research papers as assessments need to change, as those will easily be better when written by machines than humans. Continued emphasis on such learning strategies not only invites continued and unwinnable struggles with student “plagiarism,” and simply trains students to try to compete against machines; a battle they cannot win. While students will still need to learn at least the basics of writing, educators need to re-imagine how writing instruction and our learning expectations for students need to change in the world of AI writing copilots. Individuals involved in education related to the sciences and the broader humanities will also need to revise their curriculums for an AI world, and this will require difficult conversations.
What we do know is that we need to focus on the skills that will enable students to maximize their human abilities in the age of AI. This requires a greater shift toward instruction in durable skills, AKA “soft skills, such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, leadership, and empathy.” And we know we need humans to teach these skills. Employers find there is currently a shortage of individuals that have these skills and are willing to pay a premium for them.
Well-designed project-based learning, experiential learning, service learning, work-based learning, portfolio building, and debate that test the unique human contributions in real-time in ways that can’t be done exclusively by machines, but can be done by teachers and students in collaboration with machine copilots, offer the best solutions. These are ideas that are familiar to many educators and can be implemented on a broader scale without significant disruption. Many have been calling for these approaches for decades and they are consistent with what organizations such as the World Economic Forum argue are essential for employees as we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
- Develop a framework
Humans have been dealing with linear change for centuries. The growth of computational power has accelerated the rate of linear change, but it has remained linear. As AI advances accelerate and AIs begin to create new AIs, we will soon be faced with exponential change, something humans have never previously experienced. In a world of exponential change, it is not possible to develop policies that manage and regulate every instance. What schools will need is a framework for managing the rapid rate of change we are about to experience, which only reinforces the need to begin by engaging faculty and staff. Educational institutions that are operating under 3-5 year plans that do not account for active AI tools are operating with something that is no longer relevant; we need to start planning to educate students who will live and work in an AI world.
The release of ChatGPT3.5 in November took education and the broader world by surprise. Since its abilities collided with one of the most common assessments in education, the research paper, it came crashing into the view of educators who had to deal with its presence. ChatGPT and other GAI bots were not designed, however, to be “plagiarism tools,” and despite all the recent outcry, the issue will likely be at best a footnote in the history of the emerging AI world where everything we do from how we live and how we work will be reshaped by the presence of active computer technologies that will eventually become smarter than us. The important questions shaping the educational community are what and how students need to learn in this new world, and they should begin to engage it with as much priority as industry and the military, where AI will reshape everything.
The best time to start is now. As Ross Anderson notes in the September issue of the Atlantic:
We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he [Altman, Open AI] said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.” Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.
So, yes, we’ve been served notice. The question is how we respond, and how we respond will likely shape what educational institutions remain relevant in the next 5-10 years; institutions that do not change in a “fundamentally changed” and “new world” will not survive.
Fortunately, education has a great capacity to change. It features some of the kindest, most intelligent, and most well-educated people in the world who are already able to reason, perceive situations, solve problems, plan responses, and apply their learning to new situations such as the one we find ourselves in. If they begin now to take meaningful measures to engage students and faculty in an empathetic way and work to develop students’ unique human abilities in the world of AI, the future of humanity will remain bright.
