Artificial intelligence (AI) programs, which are all the rage and adding millions of users every day, are already being used by students in schools and universities thanks to the ability of chatbots to give correct and complete answers, so Education specialists recommend having an “urgent” discussion about the use of this technology in the classroom and adding it to “new pedagogical strategies.”
Since in November the American company OpenAi allowed the public use of its platform ChatGPT and then the programs were added Bardfrom Google, and Bingfrom Microsfot, AI has filtered into all areas of life, including school, forcing certain guidelines to be reconfigured since these platforms can easily create an academic essay or other pieces.
“It is something that cannot be avoided, it has already happened. We cannot turn it off or prohibit it. We need to find strategies that help us continue to think about education now with the support of these tools”explained to Télam Ariel Merpert, executive director of the Ideas that Transform Foundation, organizer of TEDxRíodelaPlata and consultant in the implementation of technologies in education.
Merpert is in the United States touring the cities of Washington, Cleveland, East Lansing, Kalamazoo and Chicago in contact with officials, entrepreneurs, teachers and students to learn about different ways of technological innovation in education applied in schools and universities.
“Here the use of artificial intelligence chatbots exploded, it is the number one topic on everyone’s agenda. The use became popular at the end of last year, they took them in the middle of the semester, so many tasks were given to the program and They were perfect, in a natural language,” he said.
“This current technology puts these proposals to students in check because the tool can elaborate and relate. It can do a lot of things and many more that we don’t even know yet”Ariel Merpert
Merpert assured that the use of chatbots generated “a tremendous stir” in the American educational field, for which many officials and teachers asked to ban it.
“It was a logical reaction, when technological innovations appeared, the school reacted in different ways. When the encarta at the time or later with Google and Wikipedia, the teachers could no longer give the terminological instructions because you could copy and paste the definition. These questions entered into crisis, the teachers changed and the students were invited to relate, to produce content,” explained the specialist.
“However, this current technology jeopardizes those proposals for students because the tool can elaborate and relate. It can do a lot of things and many more that we don’t even know about yet,” he warned.
AI came to the classroom
On one of his tours, Merpert met a teacher in Cleveland who has already added to his curriculum the use of chatbots with a particular strategy.
“A teacher who is an expert in science and technology asked the students to ask the chat for a certain answer and for them to deliver the chat and a paragraph with an improved version with a personal point of view”asserted the executive director of TEDx and appreciated that initiatives like this are “a first step.”
“You have to integrate the chat as a trigger. There are many strategies, the teachers are creative and they will find a way around it,” he asserted.
One of the concerns that several technology specialists have been alerting from the public use of AI is the reproduction of biases in the data provided by the platforms.
“Algorithms in general create responses from a body of data, but these have biases, they are built in the society in which we live, they could contain discriminatory acts or incorrect information,” Merpert clarified to Télam.
The use of chatbots also became popular for jobswhere professionals began to add them to their day-to-day tasks, just as Merpert and his TEDx team did.
“The other day we were deciding the title of a talk for YouTube. We gave the program a summary of the script and asked it to give us a title. We did not use it literally but it triggered a conversation that generated a better title, focused on things that we weren’t looking”pointed out the educator and called “training to take advantage of it.”
Discuss and learn to use AI
Merpert defined as “urgent” to start discussing the implementation of AI in schools and universities.
“It’s not coming, that’s it. In general, nobody thought about it, it’s like one of those things that you think is going to happen in the future and suddenly it came and we are not ready. It is urgent that we start having conversations in the classroom about the use of technology”, he stressed, adding that Thanks to the school calendar, Argentina has an advantage over other countries that were already having classes.
“We have the advantage of starting the year and classes, we have a few months in advance. Let’s talk about it now, we have a margin to take advantage of this technology. What comes next can be great or it can be a disaster, depending on the decisions that are made “, he concluded.
