With our current iterations of AI, we seem to be only scratching the surface of the biggest technological advancement we’ve ever encountered. Its effects have already been drastic in reshaping society on an institutional level – since OpenAI’s release of Chat GPT in 2018, it has become a tool used by at least 50% of students in education. From these users, Turnitin reports that 10.3% of submitted papers contain at least 20% of AI-generated content. From this, the widespread fear that education is on its last legs, eventually being surpassed by more refined artificial models, comes as unsurprising – at this point, it’s hard to know what is doing the learning: our brains or the tools we use to organise them.
This is a valid concern, with institutions like the University of South Carolina conducting studies suggesting that AI can lean into an ‘easier way of thinking’, but along with these findings has come the exciting possibility of streamlining academic intelligence for the better. The same studies have also shown that AI acted as an effective aid to foster creative thinking in those who used it, which has similarly encouraged ‘AI-powered textbooks’ to facilitate personalised learning for students in South Korea and UAE.
Therefore, although AI’s potential is unknown to us now, our encounters with these ‘alien’ technologies are nothing new. Historically, the war on information has existed as far as technology itself, with each advancement bringing with it a threat to our current forms of knowledge. Socrates warned against writing with the concern that it would compromise our souls as “learners”, and Filippo De Strata openly described the printing press as a “whore” due to his fear that mass printing will detract from the divine exclusivity of religious texts. We now stand with the retrospective understanding that we were able to adapt to these technologies as a means to refine our information systems instead of destroying them.
It seems that we have reached these same crossroads, faced with a new horizon that could either be our final straw or the key to a more developed world. The deciding factor for this is found in our approach. Developing intelligent technologies could indeed create systems spanning far beyond our control. However, rejecting AI altogether is not the best answer by any means. To suggest that AI will be the destruction of our educational systems relies on the fact that they are well-built to begin with. Thinkers such as Ken Robinson, however, have criticised modern educational institutions as being organised on “factory lines”. Students are forced to engage in standardised testing that will engineer them to be profitable for corporate organisations. This is prioritised over more original forms of “divergent thinking”, which allows individuals to creatively and critically engage with the world around them. Our systems of education are built on the foundations of outdated structures, which prioritise this consolidation and regurgitation of information – the modern student is rewarded when asking “how?” but not “why?”
Thanks to AI software such as ChatGPT, we now have the tools that can synthesise information for us, rendering the need to learn in these standard formats obsolete. With this in mind, hopefully, we can expect education to emphasise the importance of lateral thinking, critical analysis, and original thought, rather than the mere holding of information by memory. In other words, maybe AI’s artificiality could redirect educational systems to focus on authenticity. If everything quantifiable is already covered, then maybe the truly original and diverse forms of human intelligence will finally come to the surface.
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