There is no ethical way to use AI. At least not the Large Language Models (LLMs) we’re mostly talking about these days when we talk about AI. I’m going to unpack that in a moment, but first let me stress that I am not, for a moment, calling teachers who use AI unethical. The ethical responsibility here does not lie with users of LLMs. It lies firmly with the industry that has created and promoted the use of these machines in wholly unethical ways.
Tag: teaching
Teacher Guide to AI – please help!
We must educate ourselves, and our children, to be in a position to be rationally sceptical of technological hype. As a society, we need some inoculation against magical technological thinking. But where do teachers and schools start? Without a background in Artificial Intelligence, how can we expect teachers to inoculate our kids against the hype? How do we teach them to be more savvy and compassionate consumers and makers of technology? That’s where we come in. Laura Summers from Debias AI and Dr Linda McIver from the Australian Data Science Education Institute are putting together a teacher’s guide to AI, but we need your help to make sure the guide is exactly what you need. To that end we’ve put together a survey. We would love it if you could fill it out and share it with all of your teacher friends.
Learning to be wrong
When you penalise wrong answers, you build in a sense of shame and failure to being wrong that most people never get over. It leads to cheating, to covering up of mistakes, and to avoiding doing things where being wrong is a possibility. How about, instead, we make it the default that you assume that you will be wrong in numerous ways. We make it a fundamental part of the process to figure out those ways, and even reward the finding of those mistakes. In doing so, we give people the freedom to explore, to try new things, and, above all, to learn without fear.
Lies, Damned Lies, and AI
In which I rant about tech companies marketing chatbots that are not fit for purpose. People keep telling me this tech can only improve, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and threw it one of the tests that often causes me grief in my attempts to dine out or at people's houses. Is this product gluten free?
What is Education For?
Everything we do sends a signal about who we are, and what we value. Nowhere is that more evident, or more neglected, than in education. My son has his final year 12 exams today. Every step of the process has made me angrier and angrier about the ways in which we try to ensure "objectivity", and wind up causing immense distress, and entrenching disadvantage in the system.