AI in Education Bi-weekly Digest - Issue #6

The latest AI in Education Digest includes a warning by AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio on the urgent need for research into the societal implications of AI, and a study on higher education students' attitudes towards AI tools. The potential of AI to promote literacy and education for young readers around the world is highlighted, while concerns are raised about the increasing use of generative AI by Google and Microsoft and the need for increased diversity and inclusiveness in data monitoring, audit verifications, and privacy protection. Tools and resources include Khan Academy's experimental AI guide and Microsoft Designer, a new AI-empowered application for creating professional graphic designs.

Events & Activities:

Reflecting On The Responsible Use Of Generative AI In Higher Education – Join our Zoom session to learn more as Professor Alexandre Erler from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University holds a reflecting session on the ethical uses of generative AI tools.

GAIN – Generative AI Insights (Generative AI Conference) - We are now having more experts and educators share their insights with us. Learn more from our Conference page.

News and Interviews:

AI Pioneer Says Its Threat To World May Be ‘More Urgent’ Than Climate Change - An AI pioneer, Yoshua Bengio, has warned that the threat posed by AI to the world may be more urgent than climate change. Bengio believes that AI has the potential to be used for destructive purposes and called for more research into the societal implications of AI.

AI In Education: Students’ Views On Chatbots And Cheating - The recent study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden sheds light on the attitudes of higher education students towards AI tools such as ChatGPT. The majority of the 6,000 students surveyed expressed a positive outlook towards AI tools, with over a third regularly using them for educational purposes. These tools were also credited with enhancing academic writing and language skills. However, ethical concerns arise over the use of these tools, particularly during examinations.

Khan Academy’s New AI Learning Tool Disrupts Education In A Good Way - AI can be used to promote literacy and education for young readers around the world. The article highlights the work of Worldreader, a nonprofit organization that uses AI-powered tools to provide access to digital books and educational resources to children in low-income countries. Overall, the article underscores the potential of AI to support global literacy efforts and promote educational equity.

What Governments Are Doing to Regulate AI Tools – A bird’s eyes view on the latest steps national and international governing bodies are taking to regulate AI tools.

Articles & Blogs:

Google I/O 2023 Recap – After Microsoft announced its plan to embrace GPT-4 in its products fully, Google unveiled its response to stay relevant in the AI era.

How AI Can Accelerate Students’ Holistic Development And Make Teaching More Fulfilling - Have you heard about the latest buzz in education? It turns out that AI can actually be a pretty cool tool for helping students develop in a more well-rounded way. By giving personalized learning experiences, keeping students engaged, and freeing up teachers to focus on higher-order skills, AI is shaking things up in the classroom! Of course, we do need to be careful not to let AI reinforce any biases or inequalities.

What Are LLM Hallucinations? Causes, Ethical Concern, & Prevention – Large language models (LLMs) have the capacity to analyze and generate human-like text but are prone to hallucination, which can cause harm to society. LLMs generate outputs that are semantically and syntactically correct but disconnected from reality and based on false assumptions. The major ethical concerns of LLMs are discrimination and toxic content, privacy issues, and misinformation/disinformation. Researchers are developing better regularization techniques, improving the diversity of training data, using reinforcement learning, and identifying hallucinated content to tackle the hallucination problem. However, much work still needs to be done to mitigate hallucinations in LLMs and reduce their ethical consequences.

Amid AI, Students Should Get Back To Books And Learning Without Screens - The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) models that can perform tasks such as writing essays and generating computer code as well as the average undergraduate have raised questions about what education is for. The article suggests that the discussion about AI quickly becomes a conversation about humanity and what constitutes a good and meaningful life. Rather than immersing students in the latest technology, colleges should focus on rebuilding attention spans and emphasising genuine human connection through old-fashioned reading and face-to-face discussion. Teaching students to embrace the joy and hardship of genuine relationships will mean reclaiming ground that old-school humanities disciplines have lost in recent decades.

Forget AI. Sharing Human Intelligence In Education Could Be Gamechanger - California Educators Together is an online platform that offers vetted, high-quality, and relevant professional learning and lesson plans for free to educators everywhere. It was created by Krista Herrera and her colleague who collaborated to create high-quality lessons that are available for free to educators everywhere. The goal is to expand the initiative to include a model unit for every subject and grade level, and eventually have teachers across the nation contributing to the repository.

What Are The Risks of Google And Microsoft Advancing Their Generative AI Innovations - Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced at the I/O conference that generative AI will underpin their search, Gmail, and other products. The announcement comes after Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI in January 2023 to integrate generative AI into Bing Search. The blog raises concerns about the sweeping impacts of generative AI, including AI hallucinations, escalating AI data bias risks, fake videos, fake voices, copyright infringement risks, and cybersecurity hacking risks. The author calls for increased diversity and inclusiveness in data monitoring, audit verifications from third-party auditors, and greater controls to protect citizen’s privacy.

Language Models Can Explain Neurons In Language Models – Generative AI is often considered a “black box”, which raises ethical concerns. OpenAI attempted to address this issue by using GPT-4 to open up the black box of GPT-2’s mechanism. It was an interesting attempt that produced “intimidating” results.

Tools/Resources:

Disclaimer: AI in Education has no affiliation with any highlighted free or commercial products in this section.

Khanmigo Education AI Guide – Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization creating a set of online tools that help educate students, introduces a new experimental AI guide, despite only limited access, which promised to assist the exploration of the future of learning.

CoAuthor – Created by Stanford, CoAuthor is a human-AI collaborative writing dataset that captures rich interaction between 63 writers and four instances of GPT-3 across 1445 writing sessions in English, which may inspire the linguistic researchers

Microsoft Designer – A new AI-empowered application from Microsoft that helps you create professional quality graphic designs.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the linked posts are those of the speakers and or their entities and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the project AI in Education, Centre for Learning Enhancement And Research, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong.