FROM THE EDITOR: Why Wood Pulp on Bookshelves Matter
Generative AI promises better outcomes; it will deliver intellectually stunted adults.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Proudly proclaiming that he was giving education “back to the states where it belongs,” Donald Trump has, since that March 20 Executive Order, proceeded to micromanage education from the White House.
The administration is stripping funding from programs that don’t fit his particular ideological bent, and banning books from universities (and indirectly from K-12 schools). The American Enterprise Institute is hoping to capitalize on the disruption, where one of its scholars is arguing to remove testing responsibility from the states and drop it at the feet of those in Washington who administer the NAEP exam. The effect would be not only to remove testing from the states, but to nationalize curriculum.
Trump, of course, isn’t the first president to try and dictate education from Washington. Every president since Jimmy Carter has leveraged the Department of Education to push a national education agenda. (Education scholars Diane Ravitch and Tom Loveless wrote about the importance of resisting this temptation a quarter-century ago).
While Trump’s efforts are certainly aggressive and deeply worrying to those who work in public education for a range of reasons, they are playing out against a revolution in knowledge transference that has no rival since the birth of the printing press.
In just a few years, Artificial Intelligence has jumped from a curiosity — ChatGPT — to the dominant power in business, defense, and increasingly, education.
The Luddite longing to return to world where AI doesn’t exist is a waste of time. AI is here to stay and will revolutionize life in ways we are only beginning to understand. Many of these advances will make lives better; others will not. The same can be said of every advancement in communication since the development of cuneiform in 3300 BCE.
But AI differs from previous leaps in knowledge transference in one significant way. Prior leaps — from the invention of writing to the development of parchment, moveable type, and the internet — were tied to the speed with which information could be delivered, and the numbers of people that could be reached.
Those on the receiving end of the information still had to process what was before them, and make sense of that information.
AI certainly increases the speed at which information is delivered. However, it effectively eliminates the process whereby humans must weigh information and make informed decisions as to what it means.
Garbage in, Garbage out
To understand the threat that AI poses to knowledge, one must appreciate that the data generative AI is trained on are “drying up.” This means that the accuracy of the information AI can deliver to people is not as robust as it could be.
And then there is the quality of the material AI has to work with.
Among the most concerning changes with the administration’s efforts to control education from the White House have been the government’s increasingly successful efforts to rewrite history — both academic and public.
The National Park Service has, among its other jobs, the responsibility to preserve and help interpret U.S. history for the general public. Its websites, especially those that run afoul of what the Trump Administration deems “DEI” material, is actively being scrubbed. And the problem doesn’t stop with history. The administration’s new COVID website is driven by ideology first, scientific accuracy second.
Though in their infancy, these efforts will soon end up in the generative solutions that come out of a ChatGPT request.
Lest this sound like a bad dystopian novel, remember that the Chinese government has effectively eliminated any reference to the Tiananmen Massacre on the web and is getting better at blocking information to the event in the AI tools available to its citizens.
It’s not a long leap to imagine that the recently promoted controversy over the three-fifth’s compromise — Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith has claimed that the compromise was “designed to make sure that justice was equal for all people and equality really meant equality for all,” when in fact the exact opposite is true — can move rapidly from fringe idea to fodder for an AI solution.
Question Everything
Funding loss, book bans, and nationalized testing are deeply concerning, but these actions pale, potentially, to the damage that may befall K-12 education if schools, by choice or by mandate, give AI a prominent place in American education.
AI content is not 100% accurate. And the problems go far beyond mere facts.
“Generative AI tools also carry the potential for otherwise misleading outputs. AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini have been found to provide users with fabricated data that appears authentic. These inaccuracies are so common that they’ve earned their own moniker; we refer to them as ‘hallucinations’” - MIT Management
Education, particularly in the formative K-12 years, should build the framework necessary to develop the appropriate skills for assessing the value and usefulness of information. So taught, students will learn these lessons whether the courses be math, science, or the liberal arts.
Introducing AI into the classroom — despite the good intentions — will increase the already-too-high odds that students never develop the ability to begin to think critically.
Personal Libraries
The solution to this high-tech, first-world problem may well be the lowly family library.
Children growing up in homes with 500 books or more realize considerable advantages over their peers who do not — even if their parents are functionally illiterate.
More important, a book on a library shelf will not be amended by an outside actor, as we know websites are, nor will it be misinterpreted by generative AI.
And as administrations and ideologies come and go, books on library shelves ensure that so long as governments are not reaching into our homes to remove them, the ideas and documents of the past will remain.
But their greatest strength is this.
Where AI interprets information for you, books demand that you figure it out for yourself, and in conversation with others.
With AI, the answer is the goal; with books, it’s the intellectual journey.
Leaning on AI to educate children doesn’t prepare them for the journey; it strips them of the intellectual acumen necessary to take the trip.
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Brilliant
Well done. How appropriate!