AI blows up education

Although we may not like to admit it, artificial intelligence has practically blown up our educational system in secondary school, high school, and university. The digital world had already impacted us greatly, both in the fact that the use of the internet could –and did– replace the process of searching, learning, and constructing when doing assignments, as well as in attention span and the value of the classroom as a space for training and creation: with virtual classrooms, we had moved to providing them with everything. The world at their fingertips, students believed, and they understood that the era of work and effort was over. Wikipedia, or El Rincón del Vago, became the repositories for the content that appeared in all assignments. Bibliographic resources were no longer needed, and reading even less so. Psychopedagogues, always so attentive to new technologies, considered that there was no problem, that it was a matter of changing methodologies and that, if we knew how to do it, technological resources would work in our favor. They said it was necessary to prioritize the digital skills of young people and not worry about them incorporating knowledge and understanding, but rather skills and competencies. Classrooms became playful spaces where computers and mobile phones were used –learning environments, they called them–, while reading and writing were abandoned, attention span was lost, and the teacher became a mere facilitator. Ignorance and disengagement from learning progressed appropriately, with boys and girls becoming increasingly unmotivated, incapable of effort and work, overprotected, narcissistic, and with neurolearning and mental health problems becoming apparent.For a little over a year now, AI has landed with all the destructive capacity it possesses in the face of the educational system. In assignments, there is not even the work of cutting and pasting. It does it for you directly and completely. It grounds, structures, and writes until it looks like a good job. In general, it is not yet entirely so. It makes intern mistakes: it invents bibliographic references and creates graphs for you, sometimes surreal ones. Since it is a technology that learns, it gets better and better, and with a superficial reading, obvious errors are corrected. And since its formal perfection can raise suspicions about authorship, you can ask it to introduce human errors to make it believable. If, as a professor, you read a product that you know your student did not write with any seriousness, you soon find the mechanical character in the writing, the lack of soul. We have no defense possible against this irruption which does nothing but substitute work, relegating the student who uses this facilitator tool. Again, techno-optimists claim that we must integrate it, help disciples use it, they say, appropriately and responsibly. Also that this is the future and that it "has come to stay." Of this last part, I am sure, but if we bet on technologies and methodologies that replace us – and I'm not talking about jobs, although that too – that eliminate any effort, what is fundamental in learning disappears, which is the process. Without the journey, there is no achievement of knowledge nor the value of experience. It is the annihilation of human knowledge and the loss by individuals of their singularity linked to culture and knowledge; soulless individuals.

This year we have reached the paroxysm. The final degree projects have been, for the most part, kilometer-long projects made by ChatGPT or similar. Often, it was evident in the oral presentation exercises that the authors had not even read them. A humiliation for the exercise of being a professor: for the insipid reading, for not having proof of the abuse of AI, and for – many times – having to play innocent and not get into chivalric romances. Since in the world we live in deception is, for many, more a skill than a sin, where what matters is to simulate, to make things seem..., it has reached the point that some professors, when evaluating, have used ChatGPT to summarize the projects and for the machine, moreover, to prepare the rigorous questions to be asked to the student in a tribunal. This, almost, more than dystopian is poetic: AI being evaluated by another AI, while the student and professor play dumb, as if humanly they had both done something. If this is the dynamic, we can let the AI do it while we calmly have a beer, although we won't discuss anything, since there will be nothing to talk about; the capacity to converse will have been lost along the way.By this point, if we are at all decent, we can no longer look the other way. We must rethink the meaning and purpose of learning, of what is done at university. Do you remember all that we learned when we lived or gave the so-called master classes?