Teach Secondary Issue 14.7

Tech, teaching AND TRUST Teachers aren’t going to be replaced by artificial intelligence any time soon, says Colin Foster – and here’s why… W hy do we need teachers any more? After all, for many years nowwe’ve been able to look up information on Google orWikipedia and get instant, factual answers. When I was a child, I had to visit the local library and crawl around on the floor leafing through heavy, outdated copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to find the equivalent information. In so many ways, the internet has been a massive step forward in terms of discovering information. But if we want to ask more complex questions, then what we often really need is someone to interact with – which is where human beings have tended to come in very handy! More recently, however, even that seems to have changed with the rapid growth and adoption of large language models... Competingwith the machine If our artificial intelligence prompts are sufficiently well-engineered, then AI can often respond in highly sophisticated ways, rather like a knowledgeable human might. I sometimes like to runmy draft articles through an AI and ask it to give me five objections to my argument. One or two of themmight be a bit flimsy, but I’ll often find that there’s some idea I hadn’t considered, and that the process helps me to improve what I’ve written. Of course, AI isn’t perfect, and the errors, hallucinations and outright bluffing to which it’s prone can often be hilarious. But whatever AI’s limitations might be today, by the time you’re done reading this article, they will surely be less pronounced than before. Improvements are coming much faster thanmost of us would have predicted a few years ago, and the change is going in only one direction – that of progress. So, amidst all this, what duties are left for the role of the human teacher? If the students of the future can learn by conversing with an intelligent AI that has access to the best of all that has ever been written or said, then how can a mere human teacher possibly compete with that? Big betrayals, big consequences One answer to why we’ll still need teachers is trust . We build relationships with human beings, and we learn to trust them and rely on them. If people let us down, or disappoint us, that will affect things going forward in the relationships we have. And big betrayals can have big consequences – even professional ones, for someone with the responsibilities of a teacher. AI has none of this. It lives in the moment, bluffs when it’s trained and rewarded for doing so, and has no investment in the person it’s communicating with. It will give out incorrect – possibly even dangerous – information without a care. If you point out that it’s wrong, it won’t argue; it will just shift ground and try telling you something different in order to see whether youmight like that response instead. It’s true that AI is often right about its facts, but it’s just as confident when it’s wrong. When it misleads, it will generally admit it – but AI has no shame, and doesn’t feel guilty for having led you astray and wasted your time. Youmight find AI useful, but you can’t trust it in the way that youmight trust a human teacher. An honest lackof expertise What about expertise? I was reflecting on this recently, thinking about some of my experiences as a teacher when I stepped outside of my expertise. “AI has no shame,and doesn’t feel guilty forhaving ledyouastray” 24 teachwire.net/secondary