Will AI Bring Us The Future Of Education That We Actually Want, Or Need?
From the Bucks County Beacon. The creation of Khan Academy’s chatbot tool prompted some thoughts about how useful these may or may not be.
I will confess up front that I have never been a fan of Khan Academy.
If I had ever stood in front of a classroom and delivered a canned lecture and then when students asked for help or clarification, simply delivered the exact same lecture again, parents would have called my principal, and they would have been correct to do so.
Can a vast library of short lessons of varying degrees of quality be a useful resource? Certainly. For folks who would rather watch than read, Khan Academy, like Youtube in general, can be a handy way to look something up (particularly at 11:30 at night).
When ads for Khan’s new generative language program Khanmigo started popping up, I was dubious. It’s no surprise that they want to jump on the “Artificial Intelligence” bandwagon, and join the uncountable number of companies promising to change the future of education. But while that bandwagon can carry you to some useful destinations, it has some serious limitations that you should understand before you buy a ticket.
Artificial intelligence is not intelligent
Generative language algorithms, aka chatbots, do not understand what they’re saying in any conventional sense of the word, nor do they “understand” the prompt that you give them. They are, as Science Fiction and tech writer Cory Doctorow puts it, “plausible sentence generators.”
The most “famous” of the chatbots is ChatGPT, but they all work basically the same way – in fact, at this point, many of them are using ChatGPT as their guts and spine. Khanmigo is built on GPT-4, the same generative language program as ChatGPT, the result of OpenAI – GPT-4 and ChatGPT’s parent company, which reached out to Sal Khan last year.
What ChatFPT does is actually pretty simple: they predict the next probable word. Just like your phone, suggesting the next word in that text message you’re typing out.
What makes ChatGPT good is the sheer mountain of “data” it has stored, and by “data” we mean heaping mountains of word-strings, hoovered up from the internet. It can then do what computers do best—extract a huge number of patterns quickly (if you want a really deep dive into the guts of chatbots, this post will take care of you).
Biggest immediate problem with K12 are all the infilled teaching positions. Anyone asking what is wrong needs to begin with this issue and realize that all the questions about what is wrong with education represents a big part of the problem. As for Kahnmigo, being able to interact with an identifiable body of content to test understanding and ask for clarification provides the kind of personal attention many students need. See problem #1. With a little sophistication being able to explore what you are expected to learn can be helpful.