AI? More like A*: Artificial Intelligence and it’s creep into education
Samuel Bailey, a Social Media Analyst at the Harvey Nash Group, explores how AI might creep into the classroom.
So, not only can AI read and write now, it can also form opinion. If that’s the case, what’s stopping it writing your essays and helping you get better grades?
As we all know in these, what will in the long term, baby steps of Artificial Intelligence, it is necessary to take a pinch of salt in how it works and what it produces. I
wouldn’t let AI completely write this piece for me and submit without some heavy editing. But AI data processing is coming along fast, as James Hetherington talks about
on this week’s podcast, and can read and take in information at a rate no human, or even large collectives of humans could manage. For example, this advance in data
collection allows for every written piece about an entire period of history to be consumed instantly, like James says, “AI [can] read all of the books from the 19th century
at once to do the history of the Industrial Revolution”.
AI cannot then transform this data into an informative, logical and coherent piece of writing, though. Can it?
Well, recently Tech Talks have hosted YouMakr, a platform creating original writing on almost any topic. YouMakr, originally a start-up designed as an invention helper,
has now evolved to use AI to help their biggest customers, engineering students. Rami and Abbas found that this technology existed; AI that could write originally
without plagiarism was being used for blogs and social media but wanted to adapt it for academic writing. And just like that, it works. With YouMakr you really can have
AI generate an academic level grade paper with ease. This was, of course, originally adapted with engineering students, and therefore the engineering industry in mind,
however it has significantly opened up to encompass many more topics and fields. So, the question at hand becomes, does this AI have the capability to completely
automate the very personal, unique and individual nature of writing in an academic setting? And if so, will that be the end of human expression within writing?
Surely with how far this technology has come, what it produces is to a high academic and factual level, in ways that take humans years to learn? Going back a year to my
final year of university, if I knew fellow students were using this technology, I think I would feel threatened. Granted I am an English graduate and I would hope this
technology has a way to go before reaching the ability to write a dissertation on the representation of colonialism through the female experience in Austen’s work. The
matter still remains, has this tech got the ability to replace the university experience? And if so, could it just produce perfect grades every time?
I understand this has been question after question and as articles go you may finish reading this with less information than when you started. Ultimately, AI is advancing
at an unprecedented rate and its existance in the highly creative field of educational writing composition poses questions around originally and morality. It is great that
we can consume a record-breaking amount of content and information to the credit of AI, but once we apply this to creation of new information, surely there is no longer
space for enrichment that only organic human intellect can form?
