When I think of artificial intelligence, I think of robots talking to you, self driving vehicles and the Jetsons. But it isn’t futuristic, it is now and we have been using it for a long time. According to the Alan Turing Institute an “AI system means any computational system (or a combination of such systems) that uses methods derived from statistics or other mathematical techniques to carry out tasks that are commonly associated with, or would otherwise require, human intelligence and that either assists or replaces the judgment of human decision makers in carrying out those tasks.”
As I was doing my research I did not realize how many things I used that is AI. The first tasks for humans I remember being replaced by a machine was thinking of your next word when texting on your block of a phone. Predictive text is AI. Shout out to my millennials, who remembers T9 texting! Search engines uses artificial intelligence to locate information faster. Siri is AI task manager and researcher summoned by your voice; this technology was inputted on the iPhone in 2011. I use google home to shut my lights off, lock my doors, turn on tunes, and tell me the weather. I know Netflix and other apps give me recommendations which is are all AI algorithms. Generative AI is a category of AI which is defined as programs that learn and train to be able to create products for humans based on the prompts given. Not only can they do tasks, but now they can construct new products.
An industry that has been taken over by generative AI is customer service and it sucks. I feel like the old person that just wants to talk to a real person for help. A lot of the AI I have experienced does not think outside of the box quite yet and the training they get is very black and white. If there isn’t an option given they cannot help you.
Due to EC&I 833, I have been diving into new programs to help make my job easier. I have been using Brisk Teaching Chrome Extension to give feedback, MagicSchoolai to create questions from YouTube videos, showed kids how to use Quilbot paraphrasing tool, used ChatGPT to locate research for myself and used Arlinear to create quiz questions.
The benefit to these tools is they all save us time or make things more convenient. In regard to teaching, generative AI tools gives teachers time to give more thorough feedback, or differentiate lessons quicker and adapt for our students better so students can participate in meaningful ways. My EAL students can watch the videos I have assigned in their own language or translate documents or help them paraphrase. These are all assistive technologies to help them be successful.
In other realms of our world generative AI has helped to detect fraud, identify diseases efficiently in healthcare and facial recognition for security purposes.
The idea that AI can support my career, my students learning, and make the world a safer and more efficient, convenient place is great but there are problems. We need to critically analyze this technology. The training that some AI has raises concerns such as bias, prejudices and discrimination. Also most generative AI does not exhibit emotion, interpersonal skills and morality. Humans have emotions which play a role in doing a job well in my opinion. Considering other emotions is critical. With that said, AI’s ability to understand humour and emotions is advancing. I experienced this recently when the AI DJ on spotify used humour by playing a song they thought was a summary of all my favourite music this year and it was a yodelling song. If artificial intelligence can do a task with consideration of all societal constructs, law, feelings and without bias and discrimination that would be amazing, right? Maybe yes, but machines doing all tasks better than humans, I don’t think is great either, some yes, but not all. Humans bring value to some tasks and those tasks also bring value to humans. Interaction between people is important and I think AI might slowly take this away. We will only have relationships with machines. I don’t think that would help our economy or benefit society for machines to be doing everything. Humans will lose their knowledge and livelihood.
I understand this is a bold statement and maybe far in the future, hopefully, but I think it is something to think about.
It is important to be weary of new technology. We have seen already what search engines, and social media apps have done to our society. This technology with these AI algorithms has created a confirmation bias with in our society. In history I am unsure if we have ever seen such divide between people among what is right and wrong. Social Media apps use AI to manipulate you into using their apps to make money. How is that a good thing? So this generative AI that creates a paraphrased piece of work for a student, is this beneficial? It is assisting them to help them be successful, but it also does not help them learn to critically think on their own. They will lose the skill of using a thesaurus and finding new words and to create their own work. Is this a pointless skill to have because the machine will do it for you? As Ted Talk explains humans knowing how to do the task or having the knowledge how to do it can be beneficial. I think machines doing some tasks to make our lives easier is great but we need to keep the enhancing our skills of connecting, constructing, evaluating, and critiquing to be functioning intelligent beings. We need to stay smarter than the machines! If we don’t machines will pass on knowledge to machines and humans won’t have a purpose. For now I am still going to be cautious about generative AI but I do believe we should embrace it as well and adapt our education accordingly because this is where the future is going.
