Post: Will Artificial Intelligence revolutionise education?

Image via AI The UK government has decided that the white heat of technology is the road to improvement and is backing Artificial Intelligence as the solution to many problems. This includes an education action plan .

Perhaps contrary to expectations, I am cautiously optimistic about what AI has to offer teachers and students. However, this comes with a few caveats. The first of those is perhaps encapsulated by what we might call ‘the Suno problem’. Michael Pershan on Twitter/X prompted me to go back and visit this app which I first had a look at when it was a social media phenomenon in April last year. Given a text prompt, it generates a piece of pop music.

Here’s my attempt, Dudley’s Silent Tracks , to get it to generate a piece of English folk music with a female singer about the fact that my home town of Dudley has not had a railway station since the 1960s.

If you listen to it, you will notice it does not use a female voice and it is not English folk music—it has a decidedly American flavour. This illustrates that AI is not yet even close to perfect. However, even if we trained it on the entire catalogue of Kate Rusby so it could do a better job, I don’t think it is ever going to reach the level of art. The lyrics are banal and the music is generic and derivative.

However, if you want something generic and derivative, AI can help. If you want a tool that, with varying degrees of accuracy, reflects the majority of sources, AI can be a useful tool. Critically, it can save a lot of time.

One use for AI is in planning lessons. No, asking it to produce a lesson plan for an introductory algebra lesson will not generate anything of much use. We need to be more specific and I think this is a key principle. There is a sweet spot of specificity that we need to reach when prompting AI. We need to be specific enough to produce something useful without becoming so bogged-down in […]

Will Artificial Intelligence revolutionise education?