Artificial Intelligence in Education

Artificial Intelligence in Education

Grace Willmarth

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is catching fire and growing to become a new resource in everyday lives. It’s starting to reach everywhere, especially schools. As education begins to introduce AI as an everyday resource, the question becomes, how does artificial intelligence affect the lives of students and teachers and will it change education forever? 

Due to the fact that artificial intelligence is relatively new, there’s a lot of confusion about what AI really is and what it means. According to two researchers based in India, AI is “the study of ideas to bring into being machines” that have similar abilities as humans to process information, and can imitate human emotions. Machine learning algorithms must be created and trained on specialized hardware and software, which is required for AI. For the most part, AI systems function by consuming enormous quantities of training data, searching the data for connections and trends, and then utilizing these patterns to forecast future states. In this way, an image recognition program can learn to recognize and characterize objects in photographs by looking at millions of examples, much as a chatbot can learn to make lifelike dialogues with people by being provided with examples of text chats. 

But how do people in the education system think about artificial intelligence and what are their perspectives? From talking to many students about how they believe artificial intelligence will affect their education, many of them believe that AI will have a positive impact. According to most students, it will not only affect their learning but also affect the efficiency experienced in the classroom. They also mentioned that AI would be an extra resource when needed. Teachers have a bit of a different perspective. Most teachers believe that artificial intelligence will help the efficiency in the classroom but they have concerns about students taking advantage. Although AI has a lot of benefits, it also has the issue of being able to write essays based on any level.