ENTRY OF AI INTO LEARNING PLACED US BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

Robert Wesonga

You do not have to be a cynic to doubt who has written this. Not even a Thomas, or a jealous person who goes green with envy when they see glitter from some place that is not theirs. Because, by the time you are done reading this article, you should be able to imagine that it has been written by Artificial Intelligence (AI). In its entirety. For that is how far along we have come, since the arrival of AI, and its attendant machine learning.

We are now happy to cheer AI, and marvel that soon we will be able to graduate with AI assisted accolades. In which case, you wonder, whether it will be AI or human beings graduating. In retrospect, it should not take a cynic to know that AI has made teaching and learning efficient; it has bettered on the functionality of search engines like Google, or information repositories such as Wikipedia. AI is driving the teaching and learning agenda, faster than the legendary Concorde could ever fly from London to New York.  

Recently, while having innocent banter with friends, some naughty fellow mentioned that soon, human beings will be able to leave the task of conceiving and bearing children to Artificial Intelligence. It was all funny, until one of us mentioned how this situation was going to put all men out of work. What followed was a debate about how the most unimaginable of stuff now happens – courtesy of technology and innovation.

Before we try to get serious, a little opening up on Scylla and Charybdis will put us into the loop. A story in the Greek mythology is told of two sea monsters separated by a narrow seaway: Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla, a six-headed monster, was always waiting by a cliff, to pounce onto sailors and eat them. On the other hand, Charybdis was the massive whirlpool that swallowed entire ships three times in a day. When returning home from the War of Troy, Odysseus, a mythological Greek hero, must find out how to navigate this sea dilemma; he must choose how to navigate his ship between the two monsters up to Ithaca. It is obvious that faced with the AI conundrum, like Odysseus, we must find means to navigate the AI dilemma, and get home safe and dry.

The beauty with AI is that it has made learning easier – even brought it home. Whereas we had to read through volumes of information from search engines like google, and information repositories such as Wikipedia, AI allows you to ask for exactly what we want to read. If you are a student, you can then even ask AI to frame it the way your teacher or professor likes seeing it. The only problem with this that we have to ask who really did the task: AI or the student? In all these online interaction, you do not even have to be polite! For AI does not care about sensibilities, and the aspect of courtesy and the humane when answering what you have asked.

AI enhances accessibility to learning, is flexible and offers personalized learning experiences. It can facilitate differentiated learning whereby learners with various or special needs are accommodated and served far much better than the traditional school would. 

For teachers, they do not have to spent man-hours (or is it donkey hours?) doing the laborious – and sometimes loathsome task of looking for content in books, and organizing it. AI will even prepare for them how to deliver the content to an often disinterested generation, which the luxuries of technology have turned learners into.  If you are a lazy teacher, a little stroll to an ever eager Gemini, ChatGPT or Deepseek is all you need so you can ask them to do your bidding, as you scroll through betting odds on your phone, or read the latest football gossip. In short, AI is so generous, that it gives us an opportunity descend into the flabbiness that comes with comforts.

Of course such teachers and lecturers will argue that using AI is better than the ‘yellow notes’ of the erstwhile professors, but they do not shudder to imagine how in a couple of years, they will be 20 years dead academically. An academic who surrenders fully to AI without painstaking, rigorous research is a masquerade who merely serves the interests of the big-tech companies in dreaming up solutions to drive the world into potential laziness.

However, if used creatively, AI will assist teachers can come up with relevant test items, mark assignments, and grade them objectively for instant feedback to the learners. Besides, teachers can use AI to track and predict what their learners’ future learning interests and career prospects are.

I will go back to the learners in explaining what we must fear about AI. The world over, we now have students whose entire semester’s lesson notes cannot fill the one side of a matchbox turning up to take examinations, while fully relying on AI to make up for their laziness and irresponsibility. Before Elon Musk and Gates make good their threat to replace doctors and teachers with AI, we must check against AI ruining the integrity of the global workforce. Unmitigated use of AI portends that the world will one day operate at the behest of big tech companies and Information Technology bigwigs.  

All said and done, it is obvious that we cannot avoid AI, lest we get trampled upon by the tides of time, and by those that will continue to use it. Like Odysseus in Homer’s classics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, we must choose between sailing too close to Scylla, and losing six sailors, or veering too close to Charybdis, and risk capsizing the entire ship – with all the life and treasures in it. Avoiding one danger certainly means falling into another – we have to choose the lesser. Prudence, then, will demand that we find means, policies and structures that will enable us to use AI positively, and ethically.

Note:   You may now believe that this article has been written by a human being. 100%. For AI will not be happy to say the things I have said above about itself – or will it?

 

Robert Wesonga is a freethinker who writes his own things