Is promoting 'AI' use, especially in Education, warranted?

The Plaza
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Given that none of the US Big Tech ‘AI’ players is anywhere near profitable and all are digging the hole they’re in a few $ billion deeper each quarter, I can’t help but wonder if the almost entirely positive ‘AI’ topics I see posted in the OEGlobal community are warranted.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s insufficient consideration among those who’re diving into ‘AI’ use boots-and-all of whether their work is going to be sustainable in the medium term when US Big Tech starts to remove their total subsidy on those services in hopes of getting a return on their ‘investment’.

I wonder, too, how we feel, about the ethics of promoting ‘AI’ use in education given this recent revelation (which many of us have anticipated for quite a few years now given the lack of viable ‘AI’ business model) that corporations like Microsoft (who’ve never been a beacon of ethical practice) are putting all their hopes for future profitability into the idea that fields like education will become entirely addicted (unable to function without) to their ‘AI’ offerings, and will therefore bear the extortionate prices they’ll need to charge in order to make a return.

Is that the future we aspire to for education and the coming generations of learners? Where no one knows how to do anything for themselves any more and depends completely on eye wateringly expensive US Big Tech subscriptions to do even the most basic things? Because that seems to me that’s where lots of us are actively heading. (And all this is without even considering the colossal environmental burden Big Tech ‘AI’ data centres impose on the planet in general and their local communities in particular, who tend to end up involuntarily subsidising them)

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YES! You hit the button!.. It’s the height of irresponsibility of academics to promote this totally economically unsustainable and non-viable AI ponzi scheme . Nobody in academia wants to do due diligence. They just sign contracts w/o researching the viability or real future costs of charlatan vendors. We’ve seen this show multiple times before from tech companies. Remember when everbody fell all over themselves to be either a Google Docs/Gmail school or an MS Office 365 school(it’s free! it’s cool!). Now, G and MS are some of the biggest line-item budget costs around and we’re stuck, so we give away our students’ data and cut programs just to pay for email.
This AI thing is going to be way, way worse.

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Thanks for starting something up, Dave. I am not quite sure though about the assertion:

Where is said positive discussion here? There has been in fact very little. If you mean the resources that I occasionally fling in here I do not think it qualifies as boisterous boosterism.

I would estimate that most educators are being steamrolled into acceptance as the pushes are coming from the top level odecision makers (thinking of the CSU system amongst others that have made big time $ commitments. At the same time, teachers are seeing first hand the way students are making their own ways forward. Frankly it seems like they are pressured from both sides to develop some kind of approach.

It all seems way too much, too fast. All the preceding waves of educational technology that get tossed into as metaphors, were things at first where there was educator choice to experiment, adopt. Not here.

Personally, my use is extremely limited, I have zero need to use it for writing, not for any odf my small bits of coding. Since much of my interest has always been on medio use/creation, especially images/photos, I remain saddened to see how often online writers reach for GenAI generated images, the vast majority that to me reek of sameness (I have my own fun at playing with robotic metaphors). But worst, I see content writers reaching for synthetic images over finding quality ones made by and attributable to real people (I regularly comment on blog/article writers and suggest makign use of Better Images of AI).

I would welcome more discussion, if possible without it devolving into some kind of taking sides- it’s all too complex to force us into binary camps.

If anyone has been outspoken in this vein, I would see if I can bang the pots and pans and lure Jonathan Poritz @poritzj into the discussion who has been podcasting about revolutions not being televised and has been running an AITrap for tracking AI hype articles (it looks like over 9000 of them are in the trap).

What the wave has done is call into question so many of what seemed like foundations of openness- reuse without permission or respect of rights, and also a very undermining of what we think of as “content” as something that is fixed when published.

But yes, we could use with much more dialogue about where this is all going for OER, for open practices, and how we navigate it together.

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:slight_smile: Apologies if I’ve got the wrong impression, @cogdog - most of my interaction with OEGlobal these days is in the form of emails pointing to new content on this forum, almost all of which is about people doing ‘exciting things’ with ‘AI’ in one form or another. So I readily accept that my impression might be quite skewed relative to yours, and that mine isn’t typical of most of folks’. To provide clarification, I’ve edited my initial post to replace ‘discussion I see in’ → ‘topics I see posted in’… Hope that helps correct my characterisation.

I certainly agree with your estimate about ‘steamrollering’. My impression is similar - most academics are finding that funders are focusing their research grants on ‘AI’-themed work (why!?), presumably because of existing relationships with (dependencies on?) Big Tech. It’s a sad state of affairs in my estimation.

And yes, I too share your melancholy about the way the creative process and the thrill of accomplishment is being short circuited by people just going straight to ‘AI’-generated (derivative) works.

I suppose a question we have to ask ourselves is “what need does society have for education if no one needs to know how to create anything any more, because it’s easier just to outsource it to ‘AI’?” Also, it might save (human) time right now, and therefore money, because the ‘AI’ contribution is ‘free’ (gratis) for many of us. But what happens when each prompt submission costs us $100 or some other arbitrary amount Big Tech dictates?

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I’m sure there are many on this list who aren’t all gung-ho about AI and cautious or skeptical about the hype. It’s just that hyping it is louder and trending?

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It might just be that most of the skeptics, not wanting to rain on any parades/burst any bubbles, aren’t posting many new topics… (I suppose I’m an outlier :slight_smile: to that trend)

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There are other mailing lists that are on the more critical side, if you’re looking for that?

Library of Babel
Post: assembly@lists.libraryofbabelgroup.org

List info: https://lists.libraryofbabelgroup.org/mailman3/postorius/lists/assembly.lists.libraryofbabelgroup.org

Civics of Technology (not interactive but shares content and events)
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/

We have reduced our AI programming to only critical AI literacy this year in MYFest https://myfest.equityunbound.org (take a look at the schedule)

Maha

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The Offline Internet Consortium is providing funding to pay teachers stipends to participate in the professional development that I’ll be talking about in my presentation next week at the MNGAIA Summit. My session is titled Offline AI in K–12 Education: A Privacy-First Approach to Equitable Technology Access

Here’s a link to the Summit front page. If your a teacher or educator of any kind, you might want to consider learning more about AI without tethering yourself to a corporate money and data sucking machine,