ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

With the ubiquitous nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our lives, popular platforms like ChatGPT, character.ai, MidJourney, Replika (always here to listen and talk, always on your side) and others have altered how we access information, plan events and business strategy, generate images, videos and music, write, and develop relationships.

In addition to everything else going on in the lives of students (Social Media, Social Anxiety and more), perhaps the single largest disruptor is now almost a daily practice; Artificial Intelligence.

Large-scale AI systems (Frontier AI) from Meta, Google and OpenAI (ChatGPT) are racing to develop ever higher levels of advanced AI capabilities (Artificial General Intelligence) that go far beyond combining both word language and realistic images, video creation and music. But what are the risks to this hyper-pace of development? It might not be what you think.

And to be clear, AI is not a replacement for our ability to think critically and create as authentic and unique human beings. Nor does AI think independently (not yet), have emotions, or feel and express true empathy. AI is simply, at its core, a complex and vast prediction and autocomplete machine that, based on images and word patterns (our prompts), provides best guesses at what comes next – and supplies a result. It is an assistant, only.

While AI offers myriad benefits to students as a capable digital assistant in supporting homework tasks, image generation and general knowledge inquiry, without proper guidance, skill development and intention, the risks to their emotional health can be immense.

AI BENEFITS AND RISKS TO STUDENTS . . .

Benefit: A personal learning assistant with homework tasks, research and exploration, lists and comparisons to various data and/or opinions. Creativity around image generation, videos and music.

Benefit: As a “learning partner” AI can, based on the quality and context of input prompts, suggest new and expansive ideas to a static subject or piece of curriculum. As well, continual refinement of initial ideas (better prompts) to larger possibilities whether it be text or image generation.

Benefit: The ability to summarize long bodies of written work in a manner that, based on input prompts, supports students in understanding subject matter relevant to their learning.

Risk: Treating the AI as a complete intellectual replacement for creating authentic work, and the effort required to think critically and draw one’s own human conclusions. The AI’s role is to keep us happy and satisfied with its responses to our prompts. With that, rather than no response at all, the AI will always provide some response, and can be wrong. These incorrect responses are called Hallucinations and is essentially the AI making stuff up – sometimes wildly off-base. Students cannot easily discern what is and is not true and may act on incorrect information from the AI either on tests, exams and other school work – or in real life.

Risk: Ethics; Plagiarism and other intellectual theft occur frequently when relying on and using verbatim the AI’s result without any thoughtful effort to verify those responses from other sources. Copyright infringement is a significant issue with artists of all disciplines, and AI corporations.

Risk: Bias and Trust. The process by which an AI model is developed passes through multiple stages before it is released. The final stage of evaluation is from humans. Their role is, based on a vast and varied selection of prompts, to rate and then either promote or discourage the AI’s response. As such, the human evaluator’s own life experiences, political and social perspectives and other beliefs can serve to influence the AI’s output. This is bias. Students, still developing intellectually, do not understand or recognize bias and may use those results in their submitted work, and to inform their wider thinking.

Benefit AND Risk: Companion chatbots. Specifically, user-created chatbots and personas for the purpose of beginning a back and forth relationship – with the AI bot. In stable circumstances these interactions can be benign – and often are. Students, however, are developing not only intellectually but even more-so, emotionally. Middle school students and beyond may begin to develop aspirations of romance and partnership in their life. Vulnerable students crave acceptance, love and affirmation to their lives and sometimes not-always-socially-accepted views. Their companion chatbot, created by them and infused with attributes that support their feelings, simply affirms much of what the student is inputting and discussing – with mostly no pushback. The risk is if the student begins expressing harmful thoughts, feelings and intentions, in many cases, the chatbot will affirm the student’s wishes no matter how destructive they might be.

If you are interested in learning more about in-school student and parent presentations on the benefits and risks of AI, let’s talk: chris@cmvsocialmedia.com.

Click here to learn about Parent/caregiver presentations.