Kate Hawkesby: Is AI making life easier or harder for students?

I asked AI a question the other day and it didn’t know the answer. I thought Chat GPT knew everything? It came back and said – I don’t know, but would you like me to find out for you? I mean, what do you think? That’s why I asked. Anyway I Googled it, and immediately got the answer. My question was ‘why don’t London cabbies work in the rain’ – I got the answer not only from Google but also from the next Cab I hopped into when he just told me. Always better from the horse’s mouth. But like all things, it doesn’t take long before advancements in technology become battlegrounds for hearts and souls and breeding grounds of distortion and hate. Like the internet itself. The real uses these things are intended for get hijacked by the lowest common denominator or bad actors that look to disrupt. The concern with AI at the moment is that it’s mostly being used as a toy or a tool of trickery – deep fakes, artificial voices and the like. Fake campaigns often go a long way on mainstream before they get picked up. And so it is a similarly perplexing issue for schools and students. Schools and universities now have the battle of how much students use AI and for what purpose. For every advancement in tech, schools and unis have to come up with a counter move to protect themselves from it. How can they ensure students work is their own? Many schools have already employed anti-plagiarism tools and anti-cheating software, but they have to be vigilant and work on student morals too. They have to hammer home the importance of honesty and decency when it comes to AI and not just rely on software programmes to investigate for AI detection. AI certainly speeds things up though these days. Kids don’t have to wonder for long, or try to find out anything themselves the old fashioned way, answers are these days right at their fingertips.  I often remind my kids that somehow I got through school without Google; we either had to ask the teacher, or look up books. I mean honestly, how did we get through it? It’s so much easier these days. And the books. The weight of those text books at uni, and the cost of them, they were a nightmare. And we had to lug them round and scour them for hours. These days text books are a foreign concept. You’d be hard pressed to find a text book in any child’s school bag nowadays. But the challenge is how much students use AI. Some schools are saying don’t use it all, but others are more realistic. Encouraging students to use all tools available to them in terms of asking a question, but only using answers by way of research purposes. So for example, you could ask AI the same thing you might ask Google, just not utilise the answers verbatim. And if you thought for one second you could copy, the anti-cheat software’s going to pick it up anyway. So I don’t know whether it’s harder or easier these days for kids. On the one hand all the tools and answers are there for them, but on the other hand, they have to think so carefully about what they can and can’t use. There’s that added layer of paranoia about making sure their work is legit and not plagiarized in any way. It’s a classic case of technology making life easier in some respects, but harder in others.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.