Is it time to hit the pause button on AI in the classroom?

Within a few weeks of OpenAI’s ChatGPT hitting the market in late 2022, educators took notice. Maureen Cahill, an English professor at Tidewater Community College, remembers students in one of her literature classes suddenly submitting “weirdly perfect” papers that didn’t match the quality of their previous work.

“Look at this,” Cahill remembers telling the dean of her department. “No grammar errors, no citation errors, and a couple of them have made-up quotes and made-up material.”

Very quickly, Cahill realized some students were using artificial intelligence to complete assignments. By the next semester, she noticed even more students using AI tools. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that about one in five U.S. teens who know what ChatGPT is have used it for schoolwork — and student use of AI may be growing. Some teachers are alarmed by students using AI and think it does more harm than good in education.

Despite concerns, many researchers and educators now embrace AI. Others in the field suggest pressing pause on implementing it in the classroom — at least until we know more about the benefits and harms AI poses for students.

The benefits and harms of AI in education were the focus of a recent panel at Edinburgh Futures Institute. Three panelists — education writer John Warner, Ben Williamson, University of Edinburgh professor of digital education, and Araba Sey, deputy director at Research ICT Africa, a think tank focused on expanding digital access — gathered to share their perspectives about an issue on many teachers’ minds: what role should AI play in the classroom?

Many of these harms stem from the way AI works, generating content based on existing information. This means the content it produces can be repetitive. When teachers rely on AI tools for tasks like creating lesson plans, selecting educational resources and assessing students, it increases the opportunity for automation. This “takes away the idea that teaching is a profession that’s based in subject expertise and interpersonal relations,” Williamson argues.

For students, Warner says, AI use exacerbates a “rather tragic” problem in the US education system: “it has become nearly entirely transactional.” With this, Warner is suggesting that education often relies on external rewards, like good grades or the ability to go on to a preferred university, to motivate students to master the material being taught. This creates a system where schools become similar to businesses, providing services to students who uphold their end of the deal.

Platforms like ChatGPT give students struggling to meet an immovable deadline or looking for an easy way out an opportunity to fulfill their side of the transaction without producing their own work. Students use AI for everything from proofreading essays and synthesizing notes to completing entire assignments.

However, as AI use has become more common, some teachers and institutions are trying to integrate AI into educational activities, according to research from the Walton Family Foundation. The Foundation found that “a majority of teachers are already using ChatGPT for their job, as are a third of students.” This research was cited in a May 2023 report from the US Department of Education, which says it is “committed to supporting the use of technology to improve teaching and learning.”

The panelists agreed that whether AI could benefit education depends largely on how it is implemented. Sey and Warner both suggested that AI becoming more widely used in education could be an opportunity for teachers to accommodate students’ individual educational needs.

“How do I get students thinking and learning and knowing their own minds? This could be a great tool for that,” Warner says.“[AI] is a pretty good thought partner for the students when a teacher is not available.”

For example, in Cahill’s classroom, she sees AI as a good option for working one-on-one with a student when they are struggling with detail oriented tasks — like learning to smoothly integrate sources into their papers or highlighting errors to correct.

Tom Geary, also an English professor at Tidewater Community College, says there are many ways students can use AI to enhance learning — like making sure their work aligns with the teacher’s grading rubric, generating practice questions for upcoming tests and brainstorming creative ways to approach an assignment.

“I do think there are really cool things that can be done, and I’m still learning all the time,” Geary says. “But it’s tough to figure out how much to bring into the classroom, because I don’t want to replace other things I’m already teaching [in favor of AI].”

Despite AI’s potential to enhance learning, all three panelists at the Edinburgh Futures Institute event advocated for pausing the implementation of AI in education — at least until educators and other stakeholders have taken a long look at the potential benefits and harms that students, teachers and community members might experience. In this, they join over a thousand tech leaders, who last year suggested halting generative AI development until its risks are better understood.

“Let [AI developers] go nuts in their labs, making their Frankenstein’s monster. Just don’t send that out to terrorize the villagers,” says Warner. “Come back when you have something useful rather than something you can sell.”

Still, for educators like Cahill and Geary, who already have students using AI regularly, it’s difficult to imagine what a “pause” might look like.

“I think the cat’s already out of the bag, and I don’t think there’s any going back,” Geary says. “We need to think about smart ways to avoid policing [AI use in education] but to also really teach responsible, ethical, integrations into the classroom.”