How Will ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Change Schools and Learning? | WSJ Tech News Briefing

[Music] foreign [Music] briefing it's Friday May 26th I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal filling in for Zoe Thomas parents and teachers have been worried about the way generative artificial intelligence tools like Chachi PT could impact learning Hadi partovy is the founder and CEO of code.org a non-profit focusing on Computer Science Education he sat down with the Wall Street journals editor for Europe Middle East and Africa Thorold Barker at this year's future of everything festival and they talked about how schools will need to adapt to students growing use of AI the impact AI will have on inequality and more here are highlights from their conversation what should schools be doing let's start short term I mean what should their short-term response to this be so the most common short-term response has been Banning the use of things like chat GPT which I'm not sure is terrible as a short-term response first of all because many of these AI tools aren't licensed for use by students who are under 18 but also because schools are currently assigning homework that could just be done in a second by by an AI so I'm not against bands as a very short-term tool but what schools really need to be thinking about is how to change not only how we teach but even what we teach what we expect students to learn so that instead of teaching memorization and wrote practice we teach creativity problem solving critical thinking and the use of technology for for doing the things that right now students are doing by pen and paper and I honestly think education is going to need to change not only once but education is going to need to start becoming a more adaptive system you know we we invented the the global education system for the technology of centuries ago with the printing press us and books as the main technology for information gathering and our education system is designed around reading everything you can and then getting all the knowledge inside your head and now we have information at your fingertips and AI that can synthesize even new thoughts and bring things together we need to rethink how we teach in a world where lifelong learning is how we work things not just 16 years of of learning so what are you most excited about I mean if you could point to something that you hope is changed in 10 years time in schools what what are the the one or two things you'd really love to see I mean it's very hard to to think 10 to 10 or more years time but it's worth noting that a student starting kindergarten today is going to be graduating in the late 20s 30s and so our school system needs to think about what what are things going to look like then but I believe in the long run education will be much more personalized and AI is going to be much more of a tutor that you learn from and your teacher is going to be much more of a coach and the personalization of learning also means much more adaptation of what a student's passions are rather than everybody needs to memorize the same information from all these subjects there's a smaller level of stuff that everybody's going to need to know in their heads with access to a lot more depth if they use technology and AI for learning is this an opportunity to reduce inequality is it going to increase inequality of Education what's what's going to happen with this it's a little bit of both access to computers and the internet is not equal and so for folks who don't have that kind of access this will widen those gaps but for folks who do have digital access it's very much of an equalizer because the more of a role AI plays as a teacher as a tutor everybody will have the same high quality tutor right now the quality of teaching varies very much from classroom to classroom from country to country but the quality of the technology that they use is much more equal and are you seeing I mean if you look at you know take New York City you talked about the fact that um you know you're not meant to use it under 18 and and public schools have said you can't use it for for reasons of gaming tests Etc um has the same happened in the private system and are you seeing a very different approach um from those two systems right now it's different and that's part of the irony in New York City in the public school system these AI tools are banned at Dalton the private school you know there's courses that teach how to do prompt engineering using Ai and prompt engineering just learning how to use these AI tools that most creatively is leads to a six-figure salary but it's being taught in the private school not the public school but that's a short-term situation I think both should be arriving at the same place in the long run so so over time so so short term it widens that Gap longer term you hope it'll um I think it's going to be a great equalizer um what are the biggest dangers of this coming into the curriculum that you see so I mean you know obviously you're trying to get it learned about so people understand how AI works and I assume the shortcomings and and everything else around it and also they use it for for teaching but but what is the danger here a lot of people there's many risks and part of the reason schools have been Banning this the main reason they've been Banning it is they just it does all the homework for you so they're not sure what the meaning of their their the way the school system works is going to be if it does that but there are other risks there's certainly the risk of misinformation because the way generative AI works it doesn't know everything it's kind of a really well optimized guessing machine it does its really good best guess at what you look for but that best guess could be completely false so misinformation is one issue bias is another issue because the data that AI has trained on is is human information and human learning and if that human created learning has biased the AI will perpetuate that bias student privacy and data privacy is another risk but what I'd say is the greatest risk of all is not changing not evolving education and just assuming that the education system from the 1800s is going to be equally relevant in the 2030s and that's it for Tech news briefing this week before we go a quick programming note we'll be off on Monday for Memorial Day but we will be back in your feed on Tuesday our supervising producer is Melanie Roy our executive producer is Chris zinsley and I'm Julie Chang filling in for our host Zoe Thomas thanks for listening and have a great weekend [Music] [Music]

Channel: Wall Street Journal

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Keywords: ai, chatgpt, generative ai, education, learning, ai learning, ai tech, tech, ai in education, education tech, learning tech, student, artificial intellilgence, code.org, computer science, computers, compsci, science, technology, ai news, news, tech news, techy

Id: 5MpmxHx1FZ0

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023