Henry Freytag ’24
Teachers always say, never to use ChatGPT for your homework; but what if ChatGPT was a part of your homework?
AI has been the newest and fastest developing sector of the scientific world and the economy for years. AI research has been going on for decades, but the advent of ChatGPT brought what was a niche computer science field and a sci-fi genre into the spotlight. It is therefore imperative to seriously discuss what role, if any, AI should play in our education.
Recently, I interviewed one of our computer science teachers, Mr. Ternes, and our philosophy teacher, Mr. Dahlke, along with a few students to get their takes on AI in the classroom.
Junior John Coleman believes that using AI, “could be a good studying resource. You could use it to create a specific study plan or use it to review a certain part of a book that you may not be as familiar with. Such as when you can upload a part of your notes from class, and it will make a study guide for you.”
Mr. Ternes is very optimistic about teaching with AI. Although he said he is definitely not an expert, he understands the code behind AI “to a small degree,” and has used “AI more as a coder.” He believes that not only does AI have a place in school, but it will be an ever-expanding one.
For example, in his programming classes, his students are starting to use AI more to help write their code because it can so quickly do what would otherwise take hours of work. Mr. Ternes said about his most recent project, that AI was, “a good starting point. I made a flappy bird with my face on it. So it helped with the graphics.”
With how skilled AI is at coding now, Mr. Ternes even thinks one day AI could write its code. Yet according to him, that is not something to be afraid of, in contrast to any Matrix-level threat, Mr. Ternes envisions “Jarvis from Iron Man.”
Mr. Ternes hopes that AI will be able to be a ‘homework writer’ in the future.
“I think AI should make different problems for each math student depending on where they are at.” This would help each student work on the areas that they specifically struggle in, and leave the teacher free to offer help.
St. Andrew’s subscribes to an AI tool called magicschool.ai, and it offers a multitude of services for teachers to use AI in the classroom. The program includes everything from generating lesson plans based on subjects to creating unique questions based on YouTube videos to writing multiple choice quizzes with an answer key. It can also be used to create AI-resistant writing assignments, which means it writes a prompt that other AI writing tools can’t work with effectively.
Despite the excitement around AI in education, some critics think the continued use of AI, and technology in general, is replacing what they see as indispensable student skills. Mr. Dahlke is one of those people.
For Mr. Dahlke, the big question about AI in education is not Academic integrity, it is that in some sense it replaces people’s thoughts.
“A lot of wisdom is gained by the sheer practice of thinking,” Mr. Dahlke said. “Already kids do something, and they google and follow what Google tells them. We have people arguing for the ‘good use of this’, but I’m in the camp where I’m saying, ‘the less artificial, the better’. I would argue for getting rid of all the stuff, back to paper and pencil. Where everything has to be generated by the kid.”
Coleman seems to be in a similar camp to Mr. Dahlke, saying, “I try to stay away from AI to keep myself as real as possible. I don’t want my daily life to be altered by an AI in any sort of way. I want to kind of stay true to myself rather than relying on something else.”
In fact, in regards to personal computers and other technology in the classroom, Coleman said,
“I feel like it’s made me a little bit less productive as a lot of this new technology is kind of distracting to me sometimes. Always having access to a computer or something else is distracting to me in the classroom, I feel like I’d do better without it.”
Mr. Dahlke named one example where AI could be helpful, and that was from a talk that Dr. Gamble recently gave at St. Andrew’s surrounding his and Mr. Whitman’s 10th-grade students.
Students in Dr. Gamble and Mr. Whitman’s 10th-grade classes did research projects, but this year they used AI to formulate questions based on what topics the student had picked. The AI tested the student’s knowledge surrounding the subject, and the student also had to correct the AI when it was wrong.
However, other than this positive, Mr. Dahlke not only firmly believes that AI in education is detrimental to students, but also that the way AI is being framed as a part of human society itself is folly.
“AI is leading us towards greater idiocy, greater forms of self-destruction, and greater loss of what it means to be human,” Mr. Dahlke said.
In his words, “Could a finite, fallible creature invent a machine that’s going to be in charge of them in a way that is somehow going to make their lives better? Highly unlikely. And we’re going to turn education over to that? That seems to me to be a remarkably foolish thing to do.”
Photograph by Stable Diffusion AI