AI Can’t Replace Our Teachers

Artificial intelligence is harming our students. It’s not only hindering their education, but it also promotes inequity, bias, and disinformation. This is because AI was trained on our material reality, a reality that also promotes inequity, bias, and disinformation. We don’t need to accept this world, however. We can fight to make it better and build an equitable and just society for our youth. Districts that might not have enough human resources are replacing teachers and counselors with artificial intelligence. This artificial intelligence is grading essays, designing curricula, flagging “at-risk” students, and more. This has extremely harmful consequences for our students. Students need human mentors, role models, and support systems. AI doesn’t know the experiences of marginalized people. AI can’t empathize with our students and provide them with the personalized support they need. AI only regurgitates what it was trained on, and we know that it wasn’t trained with marginalized people in mind.

Research has shown that standardized testing and academic tracking is inequitable and racially biased. AI is everything problematic about standardized testing and academic tracking combined into one awful package. AI is not actually objective, because the data it was trained on is biased. It reflects past and present prejudice and erasure. The data pool includes “Wikipedia entries altered by ideologues, corporate PR disguised as fact, TikTok conspiracies, Fox News scripts, and millions of webpages that blur the line between history and propaganda.” Artificial intelligence can never replace human empathy and critical thinking. Our students need empathetic, knowledgeable, and ultimately human support. We cannot replace our teachers and counselors with artificial intelligence.

NPE

AI Code Red: Supercharging Racism, Rewriting History, and Hijacking Learning

By Julian Vasquez Heilig | via Network for Public Education