Generative AI

TSL is currently studying how the arrival of generative AI technologies is affecting school environments. We're interviewing teachers, as well as parents, administrators and students to learn more about tools like GPT4 and DALL-E, which are now available to most students, whether school districts permit them or not.

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Generative AI + Education Survey for Educators, Parents, and Students In the last year, generative AI services like ChatGPT and DALL-E have arrived in school environments, regardless of whether teachers and school leaders want them or not.  MIT's Teaching Systems Lab is collecting information about educators and school administrators experiences and attitudes towards generative AI. This survey will be used to identify research questions, and potentially recruit participants for a qualitative research study. We've attuned the questions to teachers and administrators, but if you're a parent or student with thoughts to add, you're welcome to fill it out.

Teachlab Episode:

Back to School with AI: Are Teachers Getting the Training They Need?

We visit a school district offering two days of training to help teachers adapt to the arrival of AI in the classroom. It's GREAT, but that district is an exception.

Policy Paper:

Towards a New Theory of Arrival Technologies  

By Justin Reich and Jesse Dukes

The authors of this article introduce the concept of "arrival technologies," contrasting them with traditional "adoption technologies" which are planned and procured. Arrival technologies, like ChatGPT, enter schools without formal evaluation or training, often through student and teacher actions. The article describes how students began using Bing due to its integration of GPT4 and DallE3. This contrasts with the slower, more planned integration of past technologies like calculators and laptops. The authors argue that arrival technologies pose challenges for educators, requiring new research approaches and theories. They emphasize that inequitable resources will mean different consequences across school systems. They caution against assuming arrival is inevitable, and advocate removing technologies that harm student learning.

Policy Paper: Generative AI and K12 Education: An MIT Perspective.  In November of 2022, a Silicon Valley company launched an invention that could complete students’ homework for them. Available only to subscribers at first, by the spring of 2023 OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 was available to millions of students. As of January 2023, anyone with internet service can access the next generation, GPT-4, using Microsoft’s Bing, for free. ChatGPT and other emerging models like it are a form of generative AI, and its widespread availability poses new challenges and opportunities for schools. The response from educators falls along a spectrum, of enthusiasm and optimism on one side, and fatigue, bitterness, and pessimism on the other, and commonly, a mix of positive and negative attitudes. The optimists, the pessimists, and the ambivalent all agree that the sudden, widespread availability of generative AI has been a jolt that has left them scrambling to adapt for the past year.

Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE)

Artificial Intelligence is transforming our personal and professional lives. Around the world, governments, companies, and institutions are proclaiming that we are entering the “era of AI” with the rapid development of intelligent devices that can recognize faces and interact via speech, robots that can work alongside people to help automate warehouse logistics and manufacture goods, algorithms that can generate novel photo realistic images and music, computers that can provide decision support to clinicians to help detect cancer more reliably, and so much more. In every feat that AI can do, however, there lurks potential for misuse and the spreading of inequity. AI education can help change that.

RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) is a new MIT-wide initiative headquartered in the MIT Media Lab and in collaboration with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Open Learning. In the face of this accelerating change, our research and impact mission is to advance equity in learning, education and computational action to rethink and innovate how to holistically and equitably prepare diverse K-12 students, an inclusive workforce, and lifelong learners to be successful, responsible, and engaged in an increasingly AI-powered society.

Further Resources for Understanding Generative AI and its Impact on Education There is a dizzying array of articles, videos, white paper, podcast episodes, editorials and other material written for educators about Generative AI. Our colleague Josh Sheldon assembled some of the best, most useful, and most fascinating here.

Take a Deeper Dive

Related resources from Teachlab