My advice for folks wrestling with the Artificial Intelligence [sic] marketing blitz for education is to find trusted sources of reality based writing about the topic. Here at the Institute we follow the work of Benjamin Riley and Audrey Watters, both of whom are not only knowledgeable but who also provide lots of leads to other trustworthy sources. I also keep my eyes peeled for gems like Anne Lutz Fernandez's series about AI mania in schools.
AI skeptics come in many shades and flavors, and if you like your skepticism straight up and seriously resistant to all the magical prophecies, let me suggest Ed Zitron.
Zitron has a podcast called Better Offline and a newsletter. He's a Brit but lives in Vegas. He does PR and tech writing, and you can get a taste of what he's about in a recent Slate interview with Alex Kirschner.
One of Zitron's key points is that AI simply hasn't produced anything to merit the unending hype.
On top of that, we are years into generative A.I. Where is the horizontal enablement? Where is the thing it’s enabling? Two years. Show me one thing which you use that you go, “Oh, damn, I’m so glad I have this.” Show me the AirPlay; show me the Apple Pay. Show me the thing that you’re like, “Goddamn, I’m glad this is here.”
Or on the need to "find the product:"
Find the actual thing that genuinely changes lives, improves lives, and helps people. Though Uber as a company has horrifying labor practices, you can at least look at them and go, “This is why I’m using the app. This is why this is a potentially world-changing concept.” Same with Google search and cloud computing.
With ChatGPT and their ilk—Anthropic’s Claude, for example—you can find use cases, but it’s hard to point to any of them that are really killer apps. It’s impossible to point to anything that justifies the ruinous financial cost, massive environmental damage, theft from millions of people, and stealing of the entire internet. Also, on a very simple level, what’s cool about this? What is the thing that really matters here?
He cites a great cognitive dissonance, where we are being told to be excited about a thing that doesn't actually do the stuff that is supposed to be so exciting.
We’re being told, “Oh, this automation’s gonna change our lives.” Our lives aren’t really being changed, other than our power grids being strained, our things being stolen, and some jobs being replaced. Freelancers, especially artists and content creators, are seeing their things replaced with a much, much shittier version. But nevertheless, they’re seeing how some businesses have contempt for creatives.
“Why is this thing the future? And if it isn’t the future, why am I being told that it is?” That question is applicable to blue-collar workers, to hedge fund managers, to members of the government, to everyone, because this is one of the strangest things to happen in business history.
These claims are exceptionally familiar to educators, who are being told relentlessly that AI is going to transform education. The advantage teachers have over the general public is that we have been told that some piece of technology is going to transform education roughly a gazillion times. Unfortunately, some teachers work in districts where the administration falls for that line every single time. Every. Single. Time.
But in education, the claim that This Is The Future will always get some folks worked up, because isn't education always supposed to have one foot in the future?
Zitron also blames late stage corporate striving. Steve Jobs once talked in an interview about how a company can only gather so much of the market and only improve its products so far, and at that point the product people are pushed out, and the bean counters take over. Zitron echoes that, and offers Zoom as an example
Zoom is a company that grew based on the fact that, “Hey, I want to easily talk to someone on video and audio.” Now they’re adding A.I. bullshit because they don’t know what else to do because they have to grow forever. That’s where they all are.
These aren’t companies run by people that build products. These aren’t companies that win markets by making a better thing than the competition. These people are monopolists. They’re management consultants.
I've long argued that education is where public sector consulting ideas go to die ("Management By Objectives is tapped out for corporations--maybe we could come up with a version for schools). It may well be the same for technology that sees education not as a set of needs to be met, but as an untapped market with money to be hoovered up. Which just gets us to the position that teachers know all too well: here's a piece of tech that someone in administration thought would be cool--now go figure out how to change the way you teach so that you can use this tech, somehow.
Zitron may have less faith in AI than just about anyone out there, so you may find him a little dark for your tastes, but he does a fine job articulating some of what's bothering you about AI that you can't quite put into words. And while he doesn't address education directly, much of what he has to say will strike a familiar chord.
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