Musings: Artifical Intelligence vs Authentic Intelligence

MUSINGS

Artificial Intelligence

Yes, I use and have used AI as part of my lessons and lesson preparation. I can understand that it’s useful and can play a role in my teaching life. I’ve used it to generate dreadfully cliched AI images of students’ countries which we have then critiqued. I’ve asked it to give me 10 words related to a topic which I can use in a lesson. I have noticed in my staff room that a lot of teachers take things a bit further and seem to be very enamoured with the idea of not needing to do that much work anymore. They like the idea AI is and will be capable of creating the lesson content, the texts, the images – in short, everything that needed to be searched for before.

This is the point at which I part company with other teachers. The problem is I was already going down the road of doing less preparation for lessons. But I didn’t need AI to achieve that. It wasn’t Artificial Intelligence I needed – it was Authentic Intelligence and that is something very different.

Authentic Intelligence (or AI as I like to call it) is about learning how to be a real human being in the classroom and not a language input output monitoring machine. Authentic Intelligence is about figuring out how to establish relationships in the classroom between peers that matter and which could last. The other AI will not really help me do that because the voice of AI has an implicit bias which is safe, conservative and orthodox. That’s just the way it’s been programmed. The other AI can’t do critical pedagogy.

At this time when AI causes many to question their practice and wonder if it offers some kind of way out of the hard work of teaching, I would just say this. Do you want your students to experience lesson content generated by a faceless, nameless algorithm or lesson content that came from your soul? I know which idea I prefer.