The cause I decided to support was the pause of expansion of AI throughout public education in NYC. I chose this topic since I work with students from K-5 in an afterschool program, and I frequently have to help them with their homework. Sometimes they try to have chatbots solve their problems by taking photos of the questions and copying the answers – which I can only assume their teachers would count as academically dishonest – but sometimes they use AI because their teachers explicitly permit and even support its use for certain assignments, even creative ones. Seeing this in the afterschool program bothered me a lot because I believed that the reliance on AI at such a young age would create a dependent relationship in which my students would struggle to get work done without the use of AI.
In creating my collage, I wanted to present AI as a threat to young students. To do this, I only used two marker colors when highlighting text: orange to represent caution, and black to represent despair. I gathered letters from multiple sources to spell “BOOKS” in the middle of the collage as while I don’t quite believe books are a panacea that can remedy the impact of AI on student lives, I believe that reading books promote individual thought and creativity and can therefore reverse some of the adverse effects of overreliance on AI. I tried to include multiple images of students to present the population that is being threatened by AI, and I included the NYCDOE’s Tweed Courthouse to display the governing body that has control over the limits of AI in public schools. I also included multiple images representing AI, such as flowers constructed out of binary code, replacing the flowers that a child might normally draw given their own creative liberty. Had I had more time and resources, I would have tried to include images that include similar messages (threats from AI, students studying) to try to fill some of the blank space.
Hi Daniel, your post caught my attention because it’s something we’re all surrounded by right now, AI’s growing role in education. I like that you’re coming at this from experience with younger students, since that’s not a perspective I hear as often. You’re right that AI can create dependency and limit creativity, but I keep wondering if the bigger challenge is teaching students to use these tools ethically instead of just pretending they don’t exist. AI’s becoming such a big part of everyday life that avoiding it completely doesn’t seem realistic anymore. Maybe the real question is how we make sure students are still building their own ideas, creativity, and problem-solving skills even while they’re using these tools. Do you think schools should focus more on teaching responsible AI use instead of trying to eliminate it altogether?
Hi Daniel, I was drawn to your post because I plan on being a professor, and I’ve occasionally wondered and worried about AI when it comes to teaching and students using it. I 100% agree with your stance on books as a remedy of sorts for the AI epidemic. I honestly feel like the nation is going through a major literacy crisis in terms of how many people just don’t ever read. Reading is how we learn and challenge ideas we have. We must read to grow. There’s a certain author I enjoy and he wrote a quote into one of his books about reading: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” And I wholeheartedly agree with it. While it’s not an immediate solution to the problems of AI, it’s a homegrown way of (hopefully) ensuring that people can think creatively and critically for themselves, and not be beholden to AI and the whims of whomever operates it. I wonder, going forward, how integrated AI may become in school settings, and just generally I wonder how cultural attitudes and the perception of AI will change. Will there be more social standards on when AI should and shouldn’t be used? Will there be government regulations? It’s a fairly chaotic time right now, and AI is still, arguably, in its infancy. What will change in the next 5, 10, or 20 years, both in the technology itself and our perception / usage of it?
I actually found myself thinking about the other side of this while reading your post. I don’t think AI is necessarily the problem, I think it’s when and how it’s introduced. In elementary school, kids are still learning how to think, solve problems, and be creative on their own, so I can understand your concern about them becoming dependent on it. At the same time, I wonder if there could be a balance where AI is treated more like a calculator or tutor instead of something that does the thinking for students. What do you think that balance would look like?