We cannot close the AI Pandora's box

This is part of our series on GenAI in the Classroom. We would love to hear from you. How are you navigating GenAI in your classroom? Are you questioning or resisting its use? Actively integrating AI-assisted learning? Encouraging students to reflect critically on AI outputs? Using GenAI to support assessment design or feedback? Submit your GenAI thoughts. 

I've been considering the use of generative AI and the benefits and challenges it brings to our work in education. Some colleagues have gone back to strictly pen and paper assessments to minimize the possibility for generative AI usage. I do not personally believe in this approach, nor do I think we can forcibly close Pandora's box. AI is a tool to be leveraged to improve and accelerate learning. Similar to when Google was created, students no longer needed to peruse volumes of journals in a library to find a relevant article. While there were incidental soft skill development opportunities lost, it also made research more efficient -- allowing students to spend that energy finding more sources, or to pursue other academic interests. I think this is similar to generative AI, except the soft skills that are now unfortunately being lost are critical thinking, ideation, and resilience.

There are several challenges. First, the emergence of generative AI amplifies the existing challenges of assessment practices, board policies, and ministry directives that are rooted in neoliberalism and meritocracy. If grades sort students into better and lesser which consequently affect social mobility, students are rightly incentivized to use generative AI and skip the critical thinking stages involved when creating an assignment. This is particularly true when they firmly believe generative AI is objectively correct, or can create better outputs than they can. Generative AI also raises larger questions on the purpose of education and assessment. As much as educators can try to bring students' lived experiences and alternate submission methods (e.g., presentations, interviews, scaffolding research plans), they can all be created through generative AI. Educators are simply putting in small speed bumps in that process. If so, what are we really assessing? Are we no longer assessing content knowledge, and instead, generative AI usage and literacy?

As a teacher, I do my best to make sure that students can see the value of learning by demonstrating how course content can be applied to their own personal lives. I hope that through this process, I inspire a love for learning in my students that will overcome the education system's incentive to use generative AI in the wrong ways. I have open and honest conversations with students about generative AI as a tool to expand ideation, but not one where ideas should start and end. I also, like other educators, attempt to put in those small speed bumps to discourage abuse of generative AI. I have held conversations with my students about how this is a real issue but also an opportunity in public education. However, I am also unfortunately cognizant how all of these steps I am taking are simply band-aid fixes. That I am not fighting my students' AI use, but that I am fighting against a flawed system. The issue at large is how we stratify students based on flawed assessment policies that do not reward effort, integrity, kindness, and curiosity, but instead rewards shortcuts, and narrow definitions of intelligence.