MIDVALE, Utah — AI is quickly advancing, and we need to either learn to use it correctly or we might as well bow down to our new robot overlords. Time marches on, and technology is a dog straining at the leash to get ahead of its master. AI is having massive tremors across the globe. We cannot ignore it in education, pretending that this tool doesn’t exist is going to lead to massive problems in the future. (more specific)
Teachers are divided on this issue, some outright against it and others a bit more receptive. The main complaint is that AI can be used for cheating, and of course it sometimes is.
“I think that there has to be an ethical standard for the AI,” says David Veenstra, a teacher at Hillcrest, “that ethical standard is that the AI can’t replace a skill that the student has to know.”
The point of writing the essay is not to produce an essay. The point is to develop the skills of writing and utilizing sources to support an argument. Those aren’t happening when an AI does that work.
Emily Kunz, an english teacher, says, “Students at this point, at a high school level, are starting to replace skills with AI use that they have not developed.”
That may be true for those students who are using AI to plagiarize and cheat. I believe however that ignoring AI’s potential as a tool by pointing to an example of its misuse is limiting ourselves and harming us. If we use AI to bring focus to the skills we want to be developing and help cut out the part of the project that distracts, the learning process could improve.
“AI should be used to eliminate tasks that aren’t valuable,” Veenstra said when discussing AI use in his class.
He lets students use AI when they are looking through sources. When searching a database, students can get a lot of hits, but not all of those sources will be valuable. Veenstra teaches them how to use AI to help eliminate irrelevant information and pick sources. The students still have to read the documents, pull relevant information, and integrate it into their essays to make a compelling argument, but now the focus can be on that and not half of class time wasted on menial tasks.
Ani Arakelian, another English teacher, does a similar thing. She has her students use AI to find relevant sources before going through all the steps of analyzing the document for validity using the CRAAP test.
“Students don’t want to read a whole article to find out if it had the information they needed before it has passed the CRAAP test,” Arakelian says.
Cutting out the time students spend reading irrelevant information.
“I think at this stage, high school students, especially in english classes, should not be using AI,” Kunz says. She believes that it is limiting students’ development and only enables cheating.
“I think it is replacing fundamental critical skill building…What I see students doing now, is I see them using it to replace skills so they’re not independently developing the thinking that they need.”
I don’t believe banning it would solve the problem. Those who are willing to use AI to cheat have no qualms using it, even if it’s banned. A man who’s intending to rob a bank probably doesn’t blink if he has to illegally carry a gun to do it.
“I think if you outright ban something, students are going to do more work trying to find a way around it rather than listen to the ban,” Arakelian says. “Banning it actually makes them more aggressive in trying to get away with using it.”
The solution here isn’t to ban it. The solution is to understand AI, to learn when to use it, when using is actively harmful, and to teach all of those.
“Telling someone something is evil doesn’t give them context to why it’s evil or what’s wrong with it,” says Arakelian.
She believes that we should explain to them why we’re not using AI in certain cases and showing them where the problems are with it.
Arakelian says, “I would rather teach them how to use it (AI) in the correct way.”