I think an update on my previous blog post on [AI in education]](/ai-in-education-some-food-for-thought/) is in order. The discussion has been evolving, I am starting to see early signs of polarization, and a mix of denial and overenthusastic adoption. Ethical considerations, which had been largely ignored for a good while, are finally getting an increasingly relevant role if not in the decision making, at least in the reflections from many academics. And experimentations are picking up, starting making some clarity on the ups and downs of the current revolution.

But is it really a revolution? I can see the disruption, perhaps the fear and unrest that come from a novel hyped thing that is not fully understood yet and that we are not used to. But I don’t really see a revolution, at least in the sense of something that would fundamentally change the way we do things.

The key question is probably asking what is education and what is its purpose. I don’t have a final answer and I don’t know if there is a universal truth to this. We have debated this many times in our podcast Degrees of Freedom. While this came up in almost every episode, I’d recommend you to jump directly to these three: 3.5 What is the purpose of higher education, 3.1 Critical pedagogy, 1.1 What is the point of University education.

But I think we can agree on a few things, particularly that, with very few exceptions, education is a social activity. And it works at its best when you are surrounded by other like-minded learners, have access to an open and engaging teacher, and have plenty of space and time to talk. And this is probably why a real revolution in teaching has never really happened.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear the same kind of reflection in a recent talk by Veritasium at the Perimeter Institute, that prompted me to write this post. But I found what he said next even more interesting, and admittedly this was a connection that I had failed to make yet:

I think that the tech hype comes from a place of believing that the problem of education is not being able to get the information to the student. That’s not the problem. It’s not the problem now, and it wasn’t the problem 100 years ago. When you have books, I mean, the information is all there. Assuming people have access, the students have access to those books. And yet they’re probably not going to learn very much unless they have a great teacher, unless they have a group of like minded peers to go through that with them, unless they have a reason to do it.

If you are interested in education, I would recommend you to watch the full talk, question time included. It is really worth it.

I think the point he makes should be kept firmly in the back of our minds when we think about AI in education. AI can be a great tool to access information faster or to get help with specific boring tasks, but mostly (if not only) when you already know what you are talking about and can critically reflect on the output. And it cannot replace the social aspect of education: the interaction with peers and teachers and the motivation that comes from being part of a learning community.

I was recently reading about the difference between social networks and social media, and it felt like a similar story. It all started with social networks, an asynchronous way to connect with people, but then evolved into social media, a passive neverending consumption of content, leveraging dopamine to hook users into a black hole of never-ending, barely meaningful content. And now instead of being more connected, we are more isolated (and sad) than ever.

We should not make the same mistake to turn AI in education into a passive consumption of content.

And while we see more and more push for blindly adopting generative AI at our university in the name of progress and efficiency, there is a positive growing pushback. And don’t get me wrong, as a heavy user of AI, I don’t want to outright ban it. But I firmly believe that we cannot simply accept it uncritically. And I was recently happily surprised to see that a group of academics, including a colleague at our university, have argued about this in an open letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia. “At the time of writing this post, it contains 1,348 signatures. You may consider this a minority, but given the inertia of academics and the fact that many are largely unaware of this letter, I think this is already a significant number. Have a read, it is worth it.

And of course there are plenty of other voices that argue about the opposite, but I think this is an important step to have a balanced discussion. And it is important also to avoid ignoring the critical evidence that is already available, and shadowed by the hype and the marketing campaigns: you can find a good collection of resources in this Critical AI page.