I was surprised back then, along with the rest of the world, at the product launching of OpenAI with generative AI that would shake the whole world named ChatGPT. I was surprised because keeping tabs on AI development I knew that Google was leading the way with DeepMind. They were ahead of research and trailblazing with scientific papers published on the topic.
It caught me off-guard when the research on ‘transformers’ which DeepMind published was taken by OpenAI, who went ahead with it to beat Google to the punch by launching what is now synonymous with AI. I later realized that Google took the more conservative approach in making sure that the right moral and ethical guardrails were in place before they unleashed their own AI on the world.
The media swallowed and gulped these developments whole and fed them to the masses. At one point I became tired of AI-this and AI-that which even became a thing for the Church. Just like the recent technologies that came up, we thought that AI would be a major disruptor that will slingshot society further in unknown territory and, hopefully, a better world.
We were partially right. Large Language Models (LLMs) and their chatbots did disrupt the world: business, finance, and education among others. Yet now, a bunch of voices once buried under the AI hype began to surface these past weeks.
AI is a bubble.
It is a conflated technology with so many promises and speculations but now has finally hit the brick wall of reality. Training data has reached its limits. AI-driven business models and adjustments fall short of expectations. Academes are still in an ineffable bind on the place of AI in education.
I belong to a more conservative bunch of tech observers who think that AI is far from the sentient (and often malevolent) machines of sci-fi movies. For me it is an advanced software that is more of librarian than sage. I believe that it takes a soul to make someone sentient, and human as we are, we do not have the power to gift sentience to machines. We even don’t know who we truly are.
Wall street is feeling the shivers as the AI bubble has sent feelers that it is about to burst. Many companies are rethinking their AI strategies. AI researchers have already admitted training saturation. Our phones and personal computers, despite the AI marketing, have remained utilities albeit with amusing new features. We might have put too much trust in the promise of AI.
Yet even with a bursting bubble, the world has already been transformed by AI. Some industries and jobs saw humans replaced by AI. There are reports of AI-induced psychosis in individuals which are now cases in active study by psychologists. Ethicists are in discussion drawing the legal and ethical fence for training AI with copyrighted materials. Pedagogues now speak of the importance of “learning how to learn” rather than “how to use AI”.
In all of these, I tend towards using Marshall McLuhan’s window in evaluating AI as a new technology. AI has been a powerful extension for productivity, but it comes with a great cost of amputating essential human skills.
In my experience as educator I have bewailed how learners have heavily relied on AI for writing essays, almost always with pure and cruel dishonesty, rather than trying thinking for themselves and using critical thinking. In neurobiology, new connections between neural cells in the brain form when new knowledge is gained. I fear that with AI, neural cells remain in isolation from one another in the same way most of our young people feel isolated and alone. I agree with the pedagogues, schools today should focus on “learning how to learn” strategies aside from technology utilization.
As the AI bubble is about to burst, so are the myriad issues it has brought upon the world. Educators and and teachers must double time in coping with AI reality. Many have accused Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, of imprudence in releasing AI to a world that does not know what to do with such power. Now schools must piece together the parts and shrapnels of the burst if we must push education forward.
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