Artificial intelligence is eroding trust between teachers and students. We have to figure out better ways to keep the education infrastructure from collapsing on our young people.
See graduates boo commencement speaker over AI remarks
A CEO doubled down on his remarks about artificial intelligence after getting booed at Middle Tennessee State University’s graduation.
LOS ANGELES — Sometimes a dystopia creeps into my teacher’s imagination. It’s the one in which artificial intelligence completely takes over our education system, feeding us the curriculum that we transmit to students, who then submit AI-generated responses, which we have graded by the same chatbots while the lot of us are left to doomscroll to oblivion and, with our few remaining brain cells, contemplate our own obsolescence.
I hope that we are nowhere near that nightmare and that there is no inevitability to it, but I find it difficult to feel confident of this during the final days of a school year during which I’ve seen a proliferation of what I can’t help but call “artificial intelligence derangement syndrome.”
Students seem increasingly reliant on AI tools, and many have succumbed to the seductions of seamless cheating as the rest battle a sometimes overwhelming temptation. Meanwhile a panic is setting in, especially with older students, as they realize that what can cover up academic weaknesses can degrade their value in the job market.
It is a love/hate relationship played out as college commencement speakers simply mention AI and get jeered by graduates, among whom at least some probably exploited those tools to get through some of their classes.
And those of us who teach find ourselves fighting for the minds and souls of students, clinging sometimes desperately to academic integrity and relevance, increasingly suspicious of those students ‒ sometimes to the point of paranoia.
I don’t want to spy on my students
I have experienced my own AI derangement and am trying to overcome it. I want to trust the kids I teach. There has always been cheating, but we have never before found ourselves so unsure about the authenticity of student work.
I don’t want to spy on my students with school network surveillance software. I don’t want to assume the worst in order to ensure that they are learning. I want to believe that my greatest weapon against academic fraud is my power to convince students that integrity matters, that character matters, and that what I am trying to help them learn matters.
But I fear that I and my colleagues with the same impassioned message are overmatched. The shortcuts are so easy ‒ and mostly they are free, at least for now ‒ and for every AI tool we use to detect fraud, there is a competing tool to further conceal it.
Many of us have found ourselves reverting to pen-and-paper assignments, essays written in class without any student access to digital devices, and those piles of student papers once again cluttering our desks.
AI derangement syndrome affects both students and teachers
I have also found myself on the other side of this catastrophe. The school where I teach has a strong early college program. Every year, some of our graduates leave high school with one or more Associate of Arts degrees and up to two years of transferable college credits. Increasingly I am finding myself consoling and advising students who have been accused by their online college teachers of using ChatGPT and other bots to write at least part of their paper for them.
Some of these kids may well have used AI to varying degrees, but at least a few of them were genuinely dismayed by these accusations. And when I’ve read the essays they’ve been accused of not writing themselves, I am often confused because to me the writing is consistent with what these students have written for my class (on paper without machine assistance).
In many cases, the college professors won’t reveal which AI detector they use because such information would enable students to thwart it. They are often impervious to my students’ assertions of honesty and authenticity. I am sympathetic to these college professors ‒ and embarrassed by this AI derangement syndrome from which we all seem to be suffering.
Trust between teachers and students is a powerful thing, and it is being eroded by the tech barons and their engineering geniuses who have, without much warning, dropped these powerful ‒ and powerfully corrupting ‒ tools on us and left us flailing to keep the education infrastructure from collapsing on our young people.
Evidence seems to be mounting that the big COVID-19 tech push in K-12 may be proving a very expensive debacle, with reading and math skills declining throughout the country. This data is not surprising to any of us in the classroom. We are seeing what all this screentime is doing to kids, their focus and attention spans, their capacity for critical thinking, their imagination and creativity ‒ and their mental health.
The jeering of commencement speakers at the mention of artificial intelligence could represent our strongest hope ‒ a youth backlash against technologies that are creating vast wealth while impoverishing young minds and souls and threatening their earning capacity.
Hopefully, these so-named digital natives will be the ones to successfully discriminate ‒ personally, professionally and even legislatively ‒ between technologies that truly do improve life on this planet and those that are, on balance, pernicious and need to be controlled beyond the whims of innovators and their investors.
It is asking a lot of the next generations with their declining math and reading and thinking skills. Somehow, educators will have to find a way to prepare them for this brave new world. Perhaps over the summer we can all figure out new and better ways to save the souls and minds of our students.
Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992, is the author of “Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher” and “A Lasting Impact in the Classroom and Beyond,” a book for new and struggling teachers.
