Artificial Intelligence: The double-edged sword redefining education

You do not have to be a cynic to doubt who has written this. Not even a doubting Thomas, or a jealous person who goes green with envy when they see glitter from somewhere 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 more efficient; it has improved the functionality of search engines such as Google, and information repositories like 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 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.

Doing the donkey work

The beauty of AI is that it has made learning easier. Whereas we once had to sift through volumes of information from search engines such as Google and repositories like Wikipedia, AI allows us to ask directly for exactly what we want to read. If you are a student, you can even ask AI to present information in the style preferred by your teacher or professor. The only problem is that we must then ask who truly completed the task: the student or the AI? In these online interactions, one does not even need to be polite, for AI is indifferent to sensibilities and the norms of human courtesy when responding.

AI enhances accessibility to learning, is flexible and offers personalised 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 risks encouraging a descent into the complacency that comfort brings.

Such teachers and lecturers may argue that using AI is better than relying on the “yellow notes” of earlier professors. Yet they rarely consider that, in a few years, they may be intellectually obsolete. An academic who fully surrenders to AI without painstaking, rigorous research becomes a mere façade, ultimately serving the interests of big technology companies and contributing to a culture of intellectual laziness.

However, if used creatively, AI can assist teachers in developing relevant assessments, marking assignments, and grading them objectively, providing instant feedback to learners. Teachers can also use AI to track and predict learners’ future academic interests and career prospects.

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 Bill Gates make good their threat to replace doctors and teacher with AI, we must check against AI ruining the integrity of the global workforce. Unmitigated use of AI portends than 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 classic, The Iliad, 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 behove us to 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 per cent. For AI will not be happy to say the things I have said above about itself – or will it?

Dr Wesonga is a lecturer at the University of Kabianga