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Deep awareness
Eight grand challenges for artificial intelligence and education .
By Tim Dodd
Educators and artificial intelligence specialists face eight grand challenges in dealing with the impact of AI on education , according to University of Sydney computer science professor Judy Kay , who heads the Human Centred Technology Research Cluster in the engineering and IT faculty .
Speaking to a conference , ChatLLM23 , on the ethics of generative AI last week , Professor Kay said she was “ right in the thick ” of education AI issues .
She is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education .
Her eight challenges , which she presented to the conference , are :
Curriculum change : Students need to be taught skills in the new AI tools that will be widely used in business and the professions to generate documents , write computer code , solve mathematical problems , generate education material and enable collaboration between humans and machines .
New job areas are also appearing , such as “ prompt engineering ” to give AI systems the best prompts to generate the required output .
Human control and responsibility : “ It ’ s fine to use AI . But the real point is that ultimately you ’ re responsible . We need deep awareness of limitations of the tools ,” Professor Kay said .
She pointed out that we do not even have a word for “ fact-checking ” AI output .
Educators building confidence : “ We have to get educators to the point where they can do the first two ,” she said .
Harness AI in educators ’ current work : Educators must use AI and explore what it can and can ’ t do . For example , ask it to write an exam , and then critically examine how good the result is .
Accessibility implications : AI can make things better for those with a disability . For example , it can write alt text , which describes web page images to visionimpaired people .
AI regulation fit for education : Because most education is aimed at children and young people , particular care needs to be taken to regulate AIdriven education .
“ What is informed consent when using AI ,” she asks .
The changing nature of research : AI is posing challenges for research .
Professor Kay said her colleagues at the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education had experimented with asking AI to generate fake research papers .
“ It will generate the ( research ) data for you too . Not real data but plausible data , so it ’ s pretty frightening ,” she said .
Two principles should be applied , she said . One is that AI should not write author academic papers . The second is that , where academic authors use AI , it should be acknowledged .
Rethinking AI education research : “ I think we have an incredible opportunity to build these ( AI ) systems so we can learn more about how people learn ,” Professor Kay said .
She also said university education researchers needed to work co-operatively with commercial developers of AI products in the education field . ■
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The laTesT Teaching news across ausTralia
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