Why is AI bad for education? Examining the toll of AI on learning
There’s no denying that the age of AI in education is upon us. But as much as technology can change education for the better, it can just as easily lead to worse outcomes for students.
Why is AI bad for students? Not only because it poses a dilemma that’s perfectly illustrated in headlines like “AI Writing vs Human: Battle of the Brains” and seems to be never ending. It risks depersonalizing educational processes, removing the human touch from the equation.
It can also propagate bias and misinformation, hinder the development of creativity and critical thinking skills, and come at the price of learners’ privacy.
That’s why we need to have a conversation about the ethics of using AI in a classroom – and whether the benefits of using the technology outweigh the drawbacks.
Is AI bad for education? Yes, if it depersonalizes learning
As AI is seen as a productivity booster across industries, the push for efficiency inevitably becomes a goal for AI implementation in any setting, including education.
Efficiency, however, comes at the price of the individual approach on the teacher’s part. AI is incapable of empathizing with learners: all it can do is run predictions based on data. Quantifiable data, however, never tells a full story about the learner’s needs.
At the same time, the growing adoption of technological tools reduces the interactions among students and between students and teachers.
While the question worth posing isn’t, “Why AI should be banned in schools?”, AI adoption shouldn’t come at the price of replacing human touch and depersonalizing education.
AI and education: Potential for biases & misinformation
An AI system can serve the knowledge of the whole of humankind on a platter within seconds. However, generative AI systems can spew out false facts and conspiracy theories: just search for Bard’s James Webb telescope mishap, for example.
Ergo, students can’t inherently trust the responses to be accurate. However, without sufficient critical thinking and fact-checking skills, students may fall for those false responses.
But it’s not just falsehoods worth worrying about. Large language models are prone to perpetuating racial and gender biases. Bloomberg also found these biases in Stable Diffusion’s output.
These disadvantages of AI in education are the reason why AI can’t fully automate learning processes. There should always be a human in the loop.
Negative effects of artificial intelligence in education: Critical thinking & creativity
While AI systems can create something seemingly unique, in reality, it’s anything but: the training data defines the output.
As explained in another article titled “AI vs Human Writing: The Enduring Value of Human Quality,” this leads to another one of the cons of AI in education: the illusion of creativity. As AI systems can seemingly automate creative tasks – traditionally seen as human-only activities – students are more likely to turn to them instead of doing the work themselves.
However, creativity is regularly featured in the top ten soft skills in the highest demand across jobs and industries. Ergo, if students can’t develop creative thinking while at school, they will be ill-prepared for the job market later on.
The same rings true for critical thinking and problem-solving skills. How does AI affect education negatively in this regard? With the AI’s ability to produce whole assignments from a single prompt, students become less incentivized to put effort into working on them themselves.
If students don’t fact-check and synthesize the information and build their own arguments, they won’t develop those skills – and they are as valued in the job market as creativity.
True cost of AI use in education: Privacy
Using generative AI in schools comes at a price: that price is data. All the input – i.e., prompts – is collected by the tool vendor, processed, and stored on its servers.
Students’ personal details may be accidentally revealed in the generated output if the initial data contained those. For example, one generative AI model was trained on photos of real personal medical records – and was capable of reproducing those.
But even if no sensitive data is shared with the AI system, privacy is still at risk. The companies behind the AI tools remain capable of mishandling that data – for example, by selling it to a data broker. That data can then be used for invasive advertising practices, surveillance, and even harassment.
In jurisdictions without strict personal data regulations (e.g., CCPA in California), users may not even be aware of how their data is used and where it’s processed.
The case for human touch in learning
With the “How is AI bad for education?” question answered, let us make the case for countering these downsides with a human-driven approach to academic help.
Services like EssayPro connect students with academic experts ready to assist them with their struggles. Their help is dictated by a distinctly personalized approach to every learner, making assistance more efficient at improving learning outcomes.
At the same time, such services maintain strict customer privacy policies that ensure no personal data is mishandled.
Unlike AI tools that use data and standardized methodology in their algorithmic output generation, experts rely on their empathy and experience to provide assistance.
All of this makes academic help services a solid alternative to AI use that shouldn’t be discounted no matter how advanced algorithms become.
Final thoughts
Much like electricity, the internet, and social media, AI is here to stay. However, integrating it into educational processes has to come with a meticulous assessment of the key dangers of AI in education. The most pressing ones are process depersonalization, potential bias and misinformation, impact on creativity and critical thinking development, and privacy concerns.
All these problems with AI in education can be exemplified by this Editpad essay writer review. Albeit it’s meant to streamline essay writing, the tool produces incoherent texts riddled with mistakes. At the same time, it is unclear how the user data is processed by the company behind it, leading to privacy concerns.
The decision students face isn’t whether to use AI or go it alone, however. There is a third option, one that has been around for a long time: academic help platforms like EssayPro. They connect students with experts in specific domains who provide help tailored to students’ needs.
There is only one thing left to say. Before you integrate AI in an educational setting, assess the risks against the potential benefits – and don’t neglect human-centered alternatives.