Preparing our Students for Ethically Responsible Use of AI
Tuesday 24 September 2024
As technology develops, our students continually explore the digital environments that surround them to ensure these modern-day tools are used effectively and responsibly.
“ Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable – until they happen.”
Switching on an electric light would have been inconceivable for our medieval ancestors. If your great-great-grandparents could spend a week with you, they would be blown away by your everyday life. In fact, I feel very lucky that I have already seen technologies emerge in my lifetime that would have blown me away as a child.
Innovation also happens very, very quickly these days.
It took millions of years for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking. Then, in 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon.
More recently, the first spell-checkers for personal computers appeared in 1980, such as ‘WordCheck’ for Commodore systems. Interestingly, these were paid add-ons to word-processing software. However, the market for these stand-alone paid packages was short-lived, as by the mid-1980s, developers of popular word-processing applications like ‘WordPerfect’ had incorporated spell-checkers in their applications as features.
Of course, the spelling innovation did not end there. Originally the user had to make a conscious choice to run the spell-check application. Over time we started to see red or blue wiggly lines under words or phrases which prompted us to make changes. And today we do not even have to finish typing words, we get the correctly spelled word ‘intelligently’ suggested to us, and all we have to do is hit the space bar to accept the suggestion.
While this series of spell-check innovations barely made a blip on the radar of most people around the globe, spell-checking is actually a very good example of machine-learning, a technology which is a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI). So, spell-checkers have been used by billions of people every day for years without most of them even knowing that they are using AI.
A different type of AI has spiked global interest and awareness in these technologies to unprecedented levels over the past couple of years. The technology is Generative AI, and the product which has gained the most attention is ChatGPT. ChatGPT uses a large language model (LLM), an AI technology that can generate text. These LLMs are trained on enormously massive amounts of text data so they can recognise, interpret and generate their own text.
Because technology moves so very quickly these days, we can now all find and access other types of Generative AI. Programs which can generate not just text, but images, audio or even video. These rapidly evolving technologies are also bringing a wide range of ethical implications. If the programs are trained on biased or incomplete data, this can lead to morally questionable outcomes. And when any technology is widely and freely available, there are always some people who will use it for ethically questionable purposes.
So, how should schools respond? It is obvious – they must take steps to prepare their students for this technologically rich future. At St Leonard’s College, we are launching a new compulsory, or core subject next year called Digital Literacy. This new subject will be taught collaboratively by both our Digital Technology and English teachers and will develop students’ critical and creative thinking around the digital world and their role within it.
Using various digital literacy methods, students will complete tasks over the semester to document their growth and understanding of advanced search techniques using search engines and recognised online platforms to obtain accurate information. They will compare this with other information provided by social media and Generative AI. By mastering social media literacy, digital environments and digital literacy, students will refine how they obtain and integrate information into their learning. And of course, they will enhance their 21st-century skills by exploring and understanding Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI models to support learning. They will learn how these models work, how they can be used, how to critically evaluate them, and how to ethically consider the implications implicit in these modern-day tools.
One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that human intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s driven not only by humanity’s intelligence but also by artificial intelligence. And knowing all this, any outstanding education must prepare our children for this world, this reality, this life… an outstanding education is ‘an education for life’.
By Tim Barlow, Director of Technology Innovation