The Cost of AI in Education

Society has always been apprehensive of new educational technologies. There was known opposition to the introduction of writing, printing and calculators amongst others, and yet these all have been comfortably integrated into society. This may suggest that we should not be overly concerned by the challenges posed by AI. As an educator however, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this technology is qualitatively different from anything that has preceded and that the educational terrain will never be the same. I do not believe it is unreasonable to suggest that if you have a child at school at present, they will be part of the transitional generation that will see the greatest change in the understanding of knowledge and skills in the history of humankind.

What is so different between this technology and those that have come before? Previous innovations have been there to support us, like effective and efficient assistants. AI wants to come in and run the store. We will relinquish many of our thinking skills to AI through a process of cognitive offloading. This is when we use external tools to perform the mental tasks we would normally fulfil ourselves. Examples of this would include our everyday use of calculators, spellcheck and Google Maps. The problem is that cognitive offloading comes at a cost, and as technology shoulders more of our mental burdens, the cost rises proportionately.

Learning clearly suffers when we are overly reliant on technology. A recent research project has shown that when students used ChatGPT to complete a school task, their performance improved by nearly 50%. When ChatGPT was removed however, they performed 17% worse than students who had never had access to the AI tool. The conclusion was that ChatGPT was used as a crutch, and that in the completion of the task, students had learned little if anything at all. The authors of the paper summed up their findings by saying that “…while ChatGPT can make tasks significantly easier for humans, it comes with the risk of deteriorating our ability to effectively learn some of the skills required to solve these tasks”

It is not only learning itself that suffers. It is also critical reasoning. Consider this example from the English classroom. A student can present a response to a complex question on a novel without having read the text, reflected on its ideas, analysed the question, created a plan, structured a response, developed an argument or wrestled with the wording of their essay. It is in the last few decades that breakthroughs in the field of neuroscience have identified that our brains are dynamic organs that change and develop through use and activity. What are the consequences when so many of the activities that shape our brains are transferred to the digital world? A research paper looking at the effects of AI on academic skills and writing argues that there are concerns that ‘novice writers may become overly reliant on [AI} tools, potentially impairing their long-term skill development by bypassing critical writing processes such as constructing logical arguments and understanding subject matter.’

Worse still is that it has been shown that students who use AI to complete tasks have unfounded confidence in their abilities, believing themselves to be highly competent when in reality they are less proficient than those who did the task independently. There is in my view a technological tsunami about to break on us all, and the youth are caught

in the uncertain currents that precede it. Educational solutions need to be found to challenge students’ brains on increasingly complex issues, while preventing AI from robbing us of the faculties that are so uniquely human.