Why Educators Should Engage with AI (Whether We Like It or Not)
By Jenny Taylorson, Lecturer in IELLI
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This blog post was instigated by a conversation I had with my husband recently. He’s in his late 40s and quite an experienced solicitor. Part of the role of more experienced solicitors has always been to mentor and guide trainee and newly qualified solicitors.
One of “the youth”, as he affectionately calls them, recently asked him why the firm did not make use of a particular AI-based software for preparing leases.
My husband explained to this junior colleague that, whilst the software could indeed be useful, its value depended on it being employed by experts who fully understood the work and were therefore able to properly critique the AI’s output.
In recounting this conversation, my husband reflected that his junior colleague had not grasped that AI can only function as a shortcut for certain tasks once one has already invested the time to develop genuine expertise in the field.
This, in turn, brought to mind an argument a colleague from another discipline advanced at a recent meeting. He offered what was essentially a critique of what he perceived as the university’s attempt to strong-arm academics into adopting AI in learning and teaching.
He explained, that within his discipline, he and his colleagues could identify no conceivable use for AI. As I do not work in that field, I can only respond from the outside; nonetheless, his insistence that there was “no utility” for AI struck me as being of that academic elitist quality, in which the life of the mind is held up as the purest of pursuits.
That aside, the more pressing point of critique I have is in regard to the responsibility we have to our students. To my mind, when we, as educators, refuse to engage with AI, we are effectively relinquishing any semblance of control over how it is reshaping the processes of learning. In stepping into the shadows, we create a gaping void into which our students are left to venture alone – and that, to me, is deeply troubling.
As an educator, I find the implications of my husband’s exchange with his junior colleague deeply disquieting: the apparent shortcuts to learning that AI seemingly offers are, for many, irresistibly attractive. But let’s face it, there are no real shortcuts to learning. Becoming expert in anything – whether that expertise resides in the body, the mind, or some combination of the two – takes time and effort. It is uncomfortable. It is sometimes upsetting. It is difficult. Yet it is precisely through those moments of discomfort and frustration that opportunities for genuine transformation arise.
To me, all of this carries serious implications for the next generation of adults. How are we to cultivate new forms of expertise in ourselves, if we refuse to engage in the arduous processes through which learning occurs? Is this, perhaps, the logical culmination of the post-truth age – a future in which successive generations take as their primary source of authority an all-knowing god of AI? (I realise I may be getting a little carried away here, but still…).
For me, all of the above constitutes the most compelling argument for why we must engage with AI. As educators, we have a responsibility to develop a meaningful understanding of these tools so that we can help our students realise their potential as critical, reflective actors in the world.
In a context such as higher education, simply washing our hands of AI is, I would argue, an intellectually lazy response. It also reflects a system in which academics position themselves as disciplinarians first and educators second. I recognise that this will be an unpopular view in some quarters, and it is certainly a provocative one. But my underlying message is straightforward: we need to do better as educators. (For the avoidance of doubt, I include myself in this admonition; my conversation with my husband was very much an “aha” moment for me as well).
We must consider what our withdrawal from AI means for our students. Many of them will, inevitably, engage with these tools. If we step away from the conversation, we leave them to navigate this terrain entirely on their own. Do we really want the next generation of professionals – in any field – taking their lead from an unexamined, notoriously inaccurate and often biased algorithm? I would argue, no.