UK prime minister Keir Starmer doubled down on his promise to unleash dubious “AI tutors” on nearly half a million children in need.
Starmer’s avowal came while speaking at London Tech Week on Monday. His speech was laden with everything AI. He hailed the creation of a new AI data center, demanded tech companies to install surveillance software on citizens’ phones to prevent minors from sending and receiving nudes, boasted that 1.7 million workers had been “upskilled” with government provided AI training, and announced a new AI jobs tool to help the jobless find work and create CVs, the irony of which we will not even attempt to articulate.
That brings us to Starmer’s education gambit. The government will roll out AI tutors to 450,000 children on free school meals, he proclaimed, in a bid “to close the attainment gap.” That’s the gap in the educational success between students from different social backgrounds.
But the logic behind this initiative, first announced in January, is on shaky ground.
Noting that disadvantaged children pass standardized English and math exams at half the rate their peers do, the original announcement cites evidence showing that one-to-one tutoring can accelerate a child’s learning by around five months, before observing that access to tutoring is “deeply unequal.” Here, AI tutors can step in and “provide extra help” to disadvantaged students when they “need more practice to master their lessons” and “help them catch up with their peers.”
The problem, of course, is that there’s a significant body of research suggesting that AIs are the opposite effective learning tools, with studies showing that using AI reduced brain activity during cognitive tasks, impaired critical thinking skills, and was associated with memory loss.
Beyond that, it’s preposterous to think that handing out access to an AI chatbot is all that’s needed to reverse a kid’s academic fortunes. If anything, it only underscores just how little their government thinks of them. Sorry, you 450,000 little tax payer burdens with your free lunches: here’s a crummy, hallucinating chatbot, so can we all agree that we did our best to help you get into Oxford?
Many bemoaned Starmer’s initiative.
“Inflicting AI tutors on the poorest in society, when their effects are so little understood, is the height of irresponsibility,” tweeted Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies that generative AI tools are trained on fairly obtained data. “This government has been entirely captured by the tech industry.”
“AI for the poor, actual human teachers for the rich,” another user wrote.
The UK wouldn’t be the first nation to head down this route. Last December, Elon Musk’s xAI announced what it called the “world’s first nationwide AI-powered education program” to deploy its notoriously unbalanced chatbot Grok to more than 5,000 public schools, reaching some two million children.
More on AI: Major Teachers Union Pleads With Elementary Schools to Stop Giving Young Kids AI
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