Thank you for writing this and analysing these documents for us. I look forward to reading these thoughts, but acute AI blues is preventing me at the moment. Our university recently opted into Blackboard AI Assistant. Course leaders can now create chatbots trained on course content and equip them with personalities and AI generated portraits for students to chat with. Blackboard can now also spit out assignments that students undoubtedly use as ready-made prompts for AI's. I am sure that other colleagues sitting through a demo of these functionalities thought the same as I did: this is ridiculous nonsense, useless, harmful, a waste of time, nobody asked for this. It all looks like some Futurama joke. Yet, out of politeness to our colleagues we all pretended that 'this is fine'.
This is a sharp analysis of how the UK government's embrace of AI, under the guise of innovation, seems to be more about feeding the private tech ecosystem than benefiting the public. The focus on "sovereign compute" and "data pools" really speaks to the direction we're heading: a corporate-controlled landscape where AI’s supposed benefits for society are sidelined in favor of business profits and surveillance.
A great analysis as ever thank you Helen. What bothers me about the education 'use case' is an apparent lack of understanding of what teaching actually is. I used to teach primary and IME the only teachers who would want to outsource feedback to a bot are the ones who couldn't care less about their students. What's the point in getting children to write an essay only to not bother reading it? I used to feel excited when I opened my children's writing - I looked forward to seeing what they wrote, it showed me their thoughts and feelings and gave me a glimpse into what they believed. I still, nearly 15 years later, remember some of the lovely stories my students wrote (and the silly ones!). It would be so odd to assign a writing task and then have no clue what anyone actually produced - or worse still, having to read the stupid ChatGPT feedback instead of the words the children had laboured over. It seems somehow disrespectful to their effort. Where on earth did the idea come from? Giving feedback does take a lot of time, but any teacher worth their salt wants to spend time on it - it was wasting time on all the other stupid tasks (like triple backing wall displays, at the behest of Ofsted, I joke not unfortunately) that made the job impossible, not fun and interesting things like reading essays. The whole point of the teacher is to read the blummin' essays!
Thank you for writing this and analysing these documents for us. I look forward to reading these thoughts, but acute AI blues is preventing me at the moment. Our university recently opted into Blackboard AI Assistant. Course leaders can now create chatbots trained on course content and equip them with personalities and AI generated portraits for students to chat with. Blackboard can now also spit out assignments that students undoubtedly use as ready-made prompts for AI's. I am sure that other colleagues sitting through a demo of these functionalities thought the same as I did: this is ridiculous nonsense, useless, harmful, a waste of time, nobody asked for this. It all looks like some Futurama joke. Yet, out of politeness to our colleagues we all pretended that 'this is fine'.
This is a sharp analysis of how the UK government's embrace of AI, under the guise of innovation, seems to be more about feeding the private tech ecosystem than benefiting the public. The focus on "sovereign compute" and "data pools" really speaks to the direction we're heading: a corporate-controlled landscape where AI’s supposed benefits for society are sidelined in favor of business profits and surveillance.
A great analysis as ever thank you Helen. What bothers me about the education 'use case' is an apparent lack of understanding of what teaching actually is. I used to teach primary and IME the only teachers who would want to outsource feedback to a bot are the ones who couldn't care less about their students. What's the point in getting children to write an essay only to not bother reading it? I used to feel excited when I opened my children's writing - I looked forward to seeing what they wrote, it showed me their thoughts and feelings and gave me a glimpse into what they believed. I still, nearly 15 years later, remember some of the lovely stories my students wrote (and the silly ones!). It would be so odd to assign a writing task and then have no clue what anyone actually produced - or worse still, having to read the stupid ChatGPT feedback instead of the words the children had laboured over. It seems somehow disrespectful to their effort. Where on earth did the idea come from? Giving feedback does take a lot of time, but any teacher worth their salt wants to spend time on it - it was wasting time on all the other stupid tasks (like triple backing wall displays, at the behest of Ofsted, I joke not unfortunately) that made the job impossible, not fun and interesting things like reading essays. The whole point of the teacher is to read the blummin' essays!
Mainline - what a metaphor for our times.