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OTTAWA — With college and university students heading back to class this week, post-secondary schools are scrambling to figure out how to deal with the increasing use of generative AI in the classroom.
As some schools mull outright bans, Canadian AI pioneer Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer — professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and co-founder of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) — said he sees a lot of parallels with how educators treated the spread of pocket calculators five decades ago.
“It’s much, much harder for educators, because calculators were a very narrow niche aspect of overall education because it directly affected math,” he told the Toronto Sun in an interview.
“AI is cross-cutting … AI is going to affect everything.”
Schools, he said, need to emphasize to students that using AI doesn’t change their role in the classroom.
“We just have a new tool that helps you be more productive, but you still have to learn all the core ingredients of being an independent thinker,” he said.
Banning AI puts students behind
Rather than treating AI as a bannable threat, Schaeffer countered that post-secondary schools need to focus on teaching the responsible use of AI not to bypass actual learning, but to streamline operations and eliminate administrative drudgery.
“You can fight AI, but you’re going to lose because the advantages of these tools are overwhelming,” Schaeffer said.
“You can’t ban these tools because then students are losing out — not only on using them, but learning how to use them responsibly, and part of that responsibility is you have to take that information and put it in the proper context and decide what’s right and what’s wrong.”
Learning responsible use of AI tools, he said, is just as important as learning the pitfalls that modern AI “chatbots” harbour.
“These chatbots come across confidently when it gives you an answer,” he said, explaining that these systems aren’t like systems seen in sci-fi like Star Trek , where computers give you what you need without emotion or charming personalities.
“It sounds like it’s supremely confident, it’s authoritative, it knows what the hell it’s talking about, and I have met people who are completely swayed by that.”
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AI needs to be pitched to students as a tool, not a brain
These systems are engineered to communicate as human-like as possible, Schaeffer said, as a means to emotionally manipulate users into anthropomorphizing the tool — making people less likely use them as tools and more as a substitute for constructive thought.
“The fundamental thesis of a university is to teach you how to think, it’s not to teach you how to learn,” he said.
“University is about critical thinking … AI is a useful tool to help you get to where you want, but it’s not a tool to replace you.
“If it replaces you and it’s doing the ‘thinking’ and all of the hard work, then you haven’t received an education.”
bpassifiume@postmedia.com
X: @bryanpassifiume