Digital natives, 21st century learning, schools of the future, flipped classrooms… and now artificial intelligence. The catalogue of clever marketing for technology aimed at seducing schools has turned a shiny new page.
AI has all the right ingredients to make it a commercial success. Conceptually way outside most teachers’ pay grade, so they can’t challenge it, AI also carries a sniff of sci-fi glamour. Gullible and not so gullible key influencers with a nose for this sort of thing are already out there, busy influencing.
I don’t scan horizons and I’m not a futurist, which you might be surprised to learn is actually a real job. (I guess the HR star who thought that one up didn’t know much about the fascist-tainted art movement.) I’m a pragmatist, particularly when it comes to schools, because kids’ time in the classroom is too precious to play with so I have no time at all for this latest, admittedly shrewd sales pitch. Which is why I’m going to spell out to you what AI really means and really does today, not on some sun-blessed, golden horizon where children have meaningful learning relationships with their laptops, but in the rather less glitzy educational world of 2018.
The acronym AI is consciously used by the industry as a way of making what is in reality “machine learning” sound infinitely more clever, alluring and therefore threatening than it really is. As Michael Jordan, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, explained in a recent and brilliant essay about AI, “Machine Learning is an algorithmic field that blends ideas from statistics, computer science and many other disciplines to design algorithms that process data, make predictions and help make decisions … This confluence of ideas and technology trends has been rebranded as ‘AI’ over the past few years.”
In other words, when someone describes - with or without the aid of some glossy flowchart animation and an upbeat soundtrack - some fantastic new teaching tool that uses AI, they are lying to you. All that the piece of software will be doing is using algorithms and data to predict or decide on something. Something so trivial, they go to great lengths to hide it from you. It doesn’t know the way an individual child learns because of the number of times they pick up a mouse, or where they click on a computer screen. It doesn’t have any insight into what a child knows or doesn’t know. It just counts stuff then replaces that stuff with other stuff. Unlike even the tiniest child, it does not think.
‘It’s not Ex Machina’
Machine translation is a good case study to start with because it’s something lots of teachers will actually know about and it’s frequently touted as exemplary AI. Writing in the Independent recently, Cambridge linguist and author Andy Martin spelled it out for anyone still living the dream: “A machine translator does nothing but translate. This is how it sees its job. As a form of tautology or equivalence. One set of words is exchanged for another set of words. One code is replaced by another code.”
Do not buy anything more than this from anyone trying to sell you it. In 2018, AI is not Ava from the film Ex Machina. This is what it is like.
Leading AI experts working at one major international education company have produced a tool that marks your essays for you. Big data (and if you haven’t seen through that one by now, there’s no hope for you) is used to drive AI technology so that anyone can write an essay online and have it marked accurately and instantly. One of the “advanced” essay choices asks you about your personal use of technology. So I wrote a competent essay about IT, my pet Borzoi, and described taking her for delightful long walks in the local park where she chased the squirrels and pretended they were wolves, loping chest deep through even deeper, Siberian snows. Although its dictionary files clearly had no problems recognising the word Borzoi, the machine was of course completely incapable of discerning that walking a fantasy Russian wolfhound had nothing to do with IT and it gave me the second highest grade and some cheery, positive feedback. To be fair, it did pick up the single error I made, but it also highlighted this phrase as needing my attention and correction, “I make sure I take…” So I corrected my error and replaced “make sure” with “ensure”. Back came a message telling me ensure was wrong and I must use assure, which I really do hope has just sent thousands of English teachers into red-pen-clutching apoplexy.
So then I played fair and wrote as good a piece of fluent prose as I could muster on the day and resubmitted it. Back came that artificially intelligent feedback like a shot, telling me “You haven’t improved your writing. Review your writing and pay attention to the feedback.” It also reminded me, no doubt as part of that all-important personalised feedback loop, that my new and best effort was only worth the same, second-best grade.
That’s as glossy, as innovative, as fourth-revolutionary as it gets. That’s what investing in some of the world’s leading AI experts buys a leading international education business these days because, of course, as every consumer in the world knows, they’re worth it.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author. To read more of his columns, view his back catalogue
