this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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I'm very pro ai but this is a terrible idea.
Ignoring the fact that the tech is simply not there for this, how would an AI control the class? They will need a glorified baby sitter there at all times that could be simply teaching.
But I think the worst part of this is that certain kids still need individual attention even if they aren't special needs and there is no way the AI will be able to pick up on that or act on it.
Recipe for disaster. The part about vr headsets is just icing on the cake.
To be fair the glorified babysitter wouldn’t require 4+ years of education on educating children, so they probably couldn’t just be “simply teaching.” This is still an awful idea, they seem to be trying to save money by paying a glorified babysitter a lower wage than a teacher. Private schools can be for profit in some place, I wonder if that applies here.
The whole point is that the AI would give them the individualised attention that a single teacher doesn't have the time or concentration for. And yes, I think they said there would be a glorified babysitter in the classroom to help with the physical, rather than teaching, aspects.
I read the article a bit to fast, you are completely right.
For anyone wondering, here is the relevant bit:
Teachers already miss special needs students all the time. If anything, an AI's pattern recognition will likely be more able to detect areas a student struggles in, because it can analyze a student's individual performance in a sandbox. Teachers have dozens of students to keep track of at any given time, and it's impossible for them to catch everything because we feeble humans have limited mental/emotional bandwidth, unlike our perfect silicon gods.
The truth is that this will actually do a lot of things better than real teachers. It'll also do a lot of things worse. It'll be interesting to see how the trade-off plays out and to see which elements of the project are successful enough to incorporate into traditional learning environments.
You make a fair point and a tool made specifically for this would probably be a real boon for teachers, but I doubt they incorporated it into their system.
I'm imagining something slapped together. Basically just an AI voice assistant rewording course material and able to receive voice inputs from students if they have questions. I doubt they even implemented voice recognition to differentiate between students.
Edit: I'm imagining it wrong, every student gets his own AI.
That said time will tell and if it shows a bit of promise, it will probably be useful for homework help and what not in the near future. It just seems early to be throwing it in a class. At least, it isn't a public school where parents wouldn't have a choice.
For what it's worth, most AI tools being used in corporate environments aren't generative AI like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion. I very much doubt it will create new material, as much as control how the pre-written material is given to the students.
I went to a charter high school as a kid, and all our classes were done on computers. The teacher was in the room if you had questions that the software couldn't answer, but otherwise everything was completely self-paced. I imagine the AI being used in this school is going to be similar, where all the materials are already vetted, and the algorithm determines how and when a student proceeds through the class. The article refers to the classrooms having "learning coaches", who seem to serve the same purpose the teachers in my school did, as well.
It's quite funny reading these threads and it's full of the same technophobia. I wish I had the opportunity to have a specialised tool to help me learning when I was in highschool. I've gone back to university and there's so many tools available now it's amazing
for teachers with only some years of experience it's easy to see through a classroom and the information about special needs (or even those not so special needs) are passed from one teacher to another.
They are not a black box of questionable information. They work together, often with love as the basis of their work.
Schools aren't just about digesting information.