"Public" is a tricky term. At this point everything is being treated as public by LLM developers. Maybe not you specifically, but a lot of people aren't happy with how their data is being used to train AI.
I think you'd probably have to hide out under a rock to miss out on AI at this point. Not sure even that's enough. Good luck finding a regular rock and not a smart one these days.
I do agree with your point that we need to educate people on how to use AI in responsible ways. You also mention the cautious approach taken by your kids school, which sounds commendable.
As far as the idea of preparing kids for an AI future in which employers might fire AI illiterate staff, this sounds to me more like a problem of preparing people to enter the workforce, which is generally what college and vocational courses are meant to handle. I doubt many of us would have any issue if they had approached AI education this way. This is very different than the current move to include it broadly in virtually all classrooms without consistent guidelines.
(I believe I read the same post about the CEO, BTW. It sounds like the CEO's claim may likely have been AI-washing, misrepresenting the actual reason for firing them.)
[Edit to emphasize that I believe any AI education we do to prepare for employment purposes should be approached as vocational education which is optional, confined to those specific relevant courses, rather than broadly applied]
This is also the kind of thing that scares me. I think people need to seriously consider that we're bringing up the next wave of professionals who will be in all these critical roles. These are the stakes we're gambling with.
I get where he's coming from... I do... but it also sounds a lot like letting the dark side of the force win. The world is just better with more talent in open source. If only there was some recourse against letting LLM barons strip mine open source for all it's worth and only leave behind ruin.
Some open source contributors are basically saints. Not everyone can be, but it still makes things look more bleak when the those fighting for the decent and good of the digital world abandon it and pick up the red sabre.
I share this concern.
I see these as problems too. If you (as a teacher) put an answer machine in the hands of a student, it essentially tells that student that they're supposed to use it. You can go out of your way to emphasize that they are expected to use it the "right way" (since there aren't consistent standards on how it should be used, that's a strange thing to try to sell students on), but we've already seen that students (and adults) often choose to choose the quickest route to the goal, which tends to result in them letting the AI do the heavy lifting.
Great to get the perspective of someone who was in education.
Still, those students who WANT to learn will not be held back by AI.
I think that's a valid point, but I'm afraid that it's making it harder to choose to learn the "old hard way" and I'd imagine fewer students deciding to make that choice.
Across the world schools are wedging AI between students and their learning materials; in some countries greater than half of all schools have already adopted it (often an "edu" version of a model like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc), usually in the name of preparing kids for the future, despite the fact that no consensus exists around what preparing them for the future actually means when referring to AI.
Some educators have said that they believe AI is not that different from previous cutting edge technologies (like the personal computer and the smartphone), and that we need to push the "robots in front of the kids so they can learn to dance with them" (paraphrasing a quote from Harvard professor Houman Harouni). This framing ignores the obvious fact that AI is by far, the most disruptive technology we have yet developed. Any technology that has experts and developers alike (including Sam Altman a couple years ago) warning of the need for serious regulation to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences isn't something we should probably take lightly. In very important ways, AI isn't comparable to technologies that came before it.
The kind of reasoning we're hearing from those educators in favor of AI adoption in schools doesn't seem to have very solid arguments for rushing to include it broadly in virtually all classrooms rather than offering something like optional college courses in AI education for those interested. It also doesn't sound like the sort of academic reasoning and rigorous vetting many of us would have expected of the institutions tasked with the important responsibility of educating our kids.
ChatGPT was released roughly three years ago. Anyone who uses AI generally recognizes that its actual usefulness is highly subjective. And as much as it might feel like it's been around for a long time, three years is hardly enough time to have a firm grasp on what something that complex actually means for society or education. It's really a stretch to say it's had enough time to establish its value as an educational tool, even if we had come up with clear and consistent standards for its use, which we haven't. We're still scrambling and debating about how we should be using it in general. We're still in the AI wild west, untamed and largely lawless.
The bottom line is that the benefits of AI to education are anything but proven at this point. The same can be said of the vague notion that every classroom must have it right now to prevent children from falling behind. Falling behind how, exactly? What assumptions are being made here? Are they founded on solid, factual evidence or merely speculation?
The benefits to Big Tech companies like OpenAI and Google, however, seem fairly obvious. They get their products into the hands of customers while they're young, potentially cultivating their brands and products into them early. They get a wealth of highly valuable data on them. They get to maybe experiment on them, like they have previously been caught doing. They reinforce the corporate narratives behind AI — that it should be everywhere, a part of everything we do.
While some may want to assume that these companies are doing this as some sort of public service, looking at the track record of these corporations reveals a more consistent pattern of actions which are obviously focused on considerations like market share, commodification, and bottom line.
Meanwhile, there are documented problems educators are contending with in their classrooms as many children seem to be performing worse and learning less.
The way people (of all ages) often use AI has often been shown to lead to a tendency to "offload" thinking onto it — which doesn't seem far from the opposite of learning. Even before AI, test scores and other measures of student performance have been plummeting. This seems like a terrible time to risk making our children guinea pigs in some broad experiment with poorly defined goals and unregulated and unproven technologies which may actually be more of an impediment to learning than an aid in their current form.
This approach has the potential to leave children even less prepared to deal with the unique and accelerating challenges our world is presenting us with, which will require the same critical thinking skills which are currently being eroded (in adults and children alike) by the very technologies being pushed as learning tools.
This is one of the many crazy situations happening right now that terrify me when I try to imagine the world we might actually be creating for ourselves and future generations, particularly given personal experiences and what I've heard from others. One quick look at the state of society today will tell you that even we adults are becoming increasingly unable to determine what's real anymore, in large part thanks to the way in which our technologies are influencing our thinking. Our attention spans are shrinking, our ability to think critically is deteriorating along with our creativity.
I am personally not against AI, I sometimes use open source models and I believe that there is a place for it if done correctly and responsibly. We are not regulating it even remotely adequately. Instead, we're hastily shoving it into every classroom, refrigerator, toaster, and pair of socks, in the name of making it all smart, as we ourselves grow ever dumber and less sane in response. Anyone else here worried that we might end up digitally lobotomizing our kids?
The more people who demand better out of their employers (and services, governments, etc.), the better we'll get of those things in the long run. When you surrender your rights, you worsen not only your own situation, but that of everyone else, as you validate and contribute to the system that violates them. Capitulation is the single greatest reason we have these kinds of problems.
We need more people doing exactly as you did, simply saying no. Thank you for fighting, and thank you for sharing. Best wishes in your job hunt.
I do think you're absolutely right. I know people doing exactly that — checking out — and it does seem like a common response. It is understandable, a lot of people just can't deal with all that garbage being firehosed into their faces, and the level of crazy ratcheting up through the ceiling. And that reaction of checking out is one of the intended effects of the strategy of "flooding the zone". Glad you pointed that out.
Shining a light on a problem is good, directing people to resources where they can seek help is also fine. The problem I have with this article is that it steers into policy with statements like:
"Experts are urgently calling for a national strategy on pornography"
and the ambiguous claim that:
"the government aren’t doing [enough].”
What role are they implying that government should have in any of this? By and large it seems like governments generally tend to respond to "addiction problems" with some form of ban. Anti-porn legislation seems to amount to poorly drafted, ill-considered blunt instruments that also seem very likely to cause more problems than the issues they claim to address (and often backed by dubious special interests that clearly have other agendas). They present the claim that it's:
"Not an anti-porn crusade"
But the article doesn't mention any other kind of action or involvement the government might take in response to the problem.
Articles that cover subjects as controversial and consequential as this should be especially careful and informative in the way they discuss them otherwise they run the risk of merely fanning the flames.
[Edited for clarity]
Awesome work. And I agree that we can have good and responsible AI (and other tech) if we start seeing it for what it is and isn't, and actually being serious about addressing its problems and limitations. It's projects like yours that can demonstrate pathways toward achieving better AI.