Artificial intelligence in education

For example, investment in education for adopting innovative technologies increased from $7 billion to $20 billion during the pandemic as trends suggest. However, digital technologies also have the potential to transform the education experience in other ways beyond just online classes. Students’ soaring use of AI tools has gotten intense attention lately, in part due to widespread accusations of cheating. But a recent poll of 1,000 students and 500 teachers in the US by studying app Quizlet found that more teachers use generative AI than students.

People are trying to solve that with other layers of deep-learning training. In the meantime — and in any case where the stakes are high — we’re going to want humans to do an accuracy review. That’s a piece of behavior in the act of writing that engenders trust, and we can’t give that away or else we just won’t trust the results as much. According to academic studies, private tutoring children with severe reading difficulty improved their reading skills by 50% in a year. Generative AI can tackle this issue by creating virtual tutoring environments. In these environments, students can interact with a virtual tutor and receive feedback and support in real-time.

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For a bullshitter, it’s neither the veracity nor the falsehood of a statement that matters but merely its utility in achieving an end. Bullshit, in this context, symbolizes discourse drained of genuine concern for truth, representing an intellectual apathy more insidious than outright deception. Enjoy a curated collection of stories, photos, videos and featured content from across campus, delivered each Wednesday afternoon. Lately, Chat GPT from OpenAI stormed the internet with its ability to engage in highly personalized conversations and definitive answers. It can answer course-related questions from a variety of domains, and can even write essays on the target topic. “I sent that to the parent and she sent me back crying emojis,” Spells says.

This can be especially helpful for students who may not have access to in-person tutoring. Recommendations by friends and influential teachers on social media led Ballaret to try MagicSchool, a tool for K-12 educators powered by OpenAI’s text generation algorithms. On the whole, generative AI has the potential to complement Yakov Livshits educators and the EdTech sector in a multitude of creative and time-saving ways, revolutionizing the traditional classroom setting. However, there is no reward without risk, and education stakeholders must remain vigilant of potential drawbacks and challenges related to bringing generative AI solutions into schools.

AI in education: Collaborative discussions and experimentation with students

Discussants questioned whether these tools will flatten inequalities or heighten them. Unequal access to such tools following pre-existing socioeconomic patterns could worsen disparities in academic performance. Uneven enforcement of students’ cheating with AI technologies and thus “gaming the system” or having access to methods to avoid detection could exacerbate inequities. Differences in local educational standards and policies may also result in differences in students’ experiences with using AI. In May, a UNESCO global survey of over 450 schools and universities found that fewer than 10% have developed institutional policies and/or formal guidance concerning the use of generative AI applications. The paper observes that in most countries, the time, steps and authorizations needed to validate a new textbook far surpass those required to move generative AI utilities into schools and classrooms.

• This is both because they may not wish to restrict the system from hallucinating entirely, but even if they did desire to do so, it simply may not be possible.
• When it comes to best practices for using generative AI in education, there is not much established yet, as this is a new domain with many possibilities.
• The full impact of AI in education remains unclear at this juncture, but as all speakers agreed, things are changing, and now is the time to get it right.

There is no simple solution to the challenges created by GenAI in learning, teaching, and assessment. It is important that staff familiarise themselves with the opportunities and risks posed by these technologies and discuss with students within their disciplinary and educational context. It also sets an age limit of 13 for the use of AI tools in the classroom and calls for teacher training on this subject. UNESCO is steering the global dialogue with policy-makers, EdTech partners, academia and civil society.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

’ For faculty, that feels overwhelming, especially at the pace that we are seeing AI change. Generative AI can be used to create virtual tutoring environments, where students can interact with a virtual tutor and receive real-time feedback and support. Also, AI can generate scripts for video lectures or podcasts, streamlining multimedia content creation for online courses. Image generation is another important ability of generative AI for education. Teachers may want to generate images with specific modifications that respond to particular course needs. Generative AI can create simulations and virtual environments once paired with other technologies, such as virtual reality.

Furthermore, for personalized learning, generative AI potentially enables the provision of step-by-step problem-solving hints and feedback to learners. If designed well to encourage learner skill development, this could really help address teacher-related challenges, as AI can replace teacher tasks to provide individualized, real-time feedback. Generative AI systems have the potential to be a remarkably adaptable and useful tool in education, both in and out of the classroom. As with almost all new technology, however, they raise risks and challenges. One of the most prevalent educational concerns around generative AI systems is their use for plagiarism, which in this context would mean students using the system to do work that they then present as something they created without AI assistance.

For example, in art and design schools, restoring old images would provide the detection of important details of artworks. Also in history classes and research, scanning and restoring old documents can be facilitated. One advantage of using generative AI to create training data sets is that it can help protect student privacy. A data breach or hacking incident can reveal real-world data containing personal information about school age children. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of digital technologies to enhance education has significantly increased as many students around the world have had to shift to online learning.

The model and the student would interact to arrive at answers together, much like how a human tutor would interact with the student. Prompts of this kind can be authored by anyone, which could challenge traditional models of curriculum design and teacher agency. The group discussed whether such a model eventually substitutes for human educators and, if so, the benefits that the human and artificial teachers bring to educational experiences. Participants highlighted idea synthesis, the ability to detect and understand nuance, and, most importantly, the ability to build relationships as potentially unique to human educators. The potential for students to use and perhaps even rely too heavily on the technology to provide immediate answers and solutions will most certainly come up when addressing the use of AI in education, with many people fearing students will use generative AI to cheat.

Artificial intelligence in education

Even so, intensive research was already underway across Stanford University to understand the vast potential of AI, including generative AI, to transform education as we know it. So giving students a description and teaching them to turn it into a story or teaching them to turn it into something else that has a human and creative dimension for it, how would you write this for a seventh-grader that doesn’t have much experience with the world? How would you write this for somebody in Russia building on the foundation of what AI gives you and taking it in ways that only people can?

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses. UNESCO produced the first-ever global standard on AI ethics – the ‘Recommendation on the Ethics Yakov Livshits of Artificial Intelligence’ in November 2021. The Recommendation stresses that governments must ensure that AI always adheres to the principles of safety, inclusion, diversity, transparency and quality.

With generative AI, computers identify the underlying pattern related to the input and produce similar content. Various techniques like Generative adversarial networks (GANs), Transformers (GPT-3, LaMDA, Wu-Dao) are used for the purpose. Generating new content based on source data, differentiating, and identifying which generated data is closer to the original are few of the key activities that happen. Generative AI systems are trained on data that will reflect the biases of the world that data stems from.