The tech industry is making sure kids will be hooked on AI for generations — by proactively sinking its tendrils deep into the education system, long before we understand the effects of the tech on young minds.
Top leaders in the space, from Microsoft to OpenAI, are pouring millions of dollars into schools, colleges, and universities, often providing students with access to their AI products. The justification, touted in a fresh New York Times piece by both by tech companies and the educators receiving the funding, is that the tools will accelerate learning and prepare students for a world driven by AI.
But the reality outside of this hype is a lot murkier and darker. Some research suggests that AI actually inhibits learning, with one notable study conducted by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon finding that it atrophies critical thinking skills.
Even more urgently, the safety of AI chatbots is looking more dubious by the day, as significant media and clinical attention is being paid toward the phenomenon of so-called AI psychosis, in which users — many of them teens and young adults — are driven into delusional mental spirals through their interactions with human-sounding AIs. Some of these spirals have even to led to suicide and murder.
New tech always causes friction in the realm of education, and teachers once clutched their pearls about the calculator, too. But never before has a tool so thoroughly outsourced the act of cognition — nevermind acted as a personal assistant, friend, or lover.
Worst of all is that AI companies are rapidly making inroads into education before the dust can settle on any of these urgent questions. In the US, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest school system in the country, deployed a version of Google’s Gemini chatbot for its more than 100,000 high school students, the NYT noted. On the other side of the learning dynamic, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, have poured more than $23 million into one of the largest teacher’s unions in the nation to provide members with training to use their AI products.
Abroad, Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, announced last month what it called the “world’s first nationwide AI-powered education program” to deploy its chatbot Grok to more than 5,000 public schools in El Salvador. Last June, Microsoft partnered with the Ministry of Education in Thailand to provide free online lessons on using AI to hundreds of thousands students, per the NYT, before later announcing free AI training for nearly as many teachers.
Some experts fear that we’re making the same mistake as with the global push to expand access to computers, known as One Laptop per Child, which did not improve students’ scores or their cognitive abilities, according to studies cited by the Times.
“With One Laptop per Child, the fallouts included wasted expenditure and poor learning outcomes,” Steven Vosloo, a digital policy specialist at UNICEF, wrote in a recent post spotted by the NYT. “Unguided use of AI systems may actively de-skill students and teachers.”
There’s an argument to be made that exposing children in a controlled environment like a school might better prepare them for their inevitable encounters with AI chatbots, providing them with the nous to safely and effectively use them. Yet top AI companies with billions in the bank have shown they’re, so far, unable to keep a tight leash on their tools and ensure they’re consistently safe. (OpenAI recently admitted that its own data showed that perhaps half million ChatGPT users every were having conversations that showed signs of psychosis, a revelation that hasn’t deterred it from letting its large language models power children’s toys.)
We’re still only beginning to grapple with the consequences that another digital innovation, social media, has had on children and teens — and now the tech industry wants to rush into the next digital experiment before we even know whether it’s safe.
The truth, clearly, is that AI companies have no idea if their products are safe or helpful for students. But in the rush to carve out market share in a competitive space, they aren’t wasting any time finding out.
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