Artificial Intelligence (AI) could mark pupil’s homework and make lesson plans, the Education Secretary has said.
Gillian Keegan said such use of AI could transform teachers’ day-to-day work giving them more scope to focus on “close up and personal” teaching which no computer could emulate.
At which point all you’ve got to do to pass though school is hack the marking LLM. You don’t need to change the results, not at all. Just get it to write the damn stuff for you…..
Politicians. Always going for the shiny 🙁
Find all this amusing because so many supposedly intelligent informed people are making assumptions about the ware that are erroneous. I suppose it’s because a section of the IT community has highjacked the term ‘artificial intelligence’ for something it most definitely isn’t. Anyone who’s been interested in the subject over the past few decades knows what a sentient machine would look like – if it’s even possible – & this isn’t it. Not even close. And of course it’s hackable.
I can remember reading a discussion about Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics for supposedly “sentient” robots. Any robot that had that proscription built in wouldn’t be sentient. Sentience implies being able to think about one’s own thinking & making decisions about it. So any really sentient robot would be able to think around the proscription & ignore it.
AI might be a neat parlour trick but there’s no actual thinking going on. Just data processing.
What I foresee is it making inroads into the distributed data processing which is what most desk-jocky jobs consist of. Where most of the “work” is communication between the desk-jockeys to coordinate the processing. The processing nodes. And yes, that can be journalists. Selecting & assembling some data according to the required parameters & producing it in a form follows rules of grammar in the required language. Something with the information processing capacity of a house fly should be able to hack that.
How to scare the Risen C’tulhu out of students and modern teachers alike, and completely flummox any “AI” we currently have:
Ban multiple choice, with extreme prejudice. Use open questions. Using oldfashioned pen and paper.
The carnage will be magnificent and beautiful to behold.
“At which point all you’ve got to do to pass though school is hack the marking LLM.”
You think they are interested in “passing through school”? The educators and politicians have already hacked the system.
“At which point all you’ve got to do to pass though school is hack the marking LLM. ”
To be fair – all you ever had to do was hack the teacher to pass.
That’s why the state of American public education is so bad – kids know the teachers don’t care and so are able to exploit that to get passing grades without learning the material.
BIS,
“Selecting & assembling some data according to the required parameters & producing it in a form follows rules of grammar in the required language.”
That first part is already not that difficult or time consuming (get a table of data, filter it in PowerBI. Making nice text around it isn’t that important.
The biggest problem is that it’s not going to be trustworthy. You write a query, you know what went into it, what assumptions you made. If you want to know how many customers are in Swindon, you would think about what you really want that to mean. Inside the town? The outskirts, the borough? You can’t just check for any “SN” postcode because you’ll get Pewsey. If you say “How many of these customers are in Swindon” to ChatGPT, which answer will it give?
That’s why I believe it’s mostly hype. People making serious decisions won’t use it, or certainly won’t pay for the answer. There’s going to be businesses that go to the wall for ChatGPT errors.
I’m an old mathematician. I never taught K-12 but have taught at UT-Austin, Ga Tech, & USF. The best for me & students was at UT-Austin where profs were assigned graders, students who had already passed the course with A’s (mostly I think). They were paid. I only assigned homework to the graders. I graded tests myself to evaluate my teaching.
It was a time saver for me & I assigned more homework, a benefit to my students.
An A-student grader told me it helped him too, as grading homework increased his understanding of the math.
My experience with that method leads me to think it should be adopted by all Universities & K-12 schools. I think student graders assigned to teachers would be a far greater aid to teachers & students than typical US K-12 teachers aids – and cheaper too.