Schools blocked ChatGPT. Now they embrace it. What changed?

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spk_0 This is In Conversation from Apple News.

spk_0 I'm Shemita Vasu.

spk_0 Today, how AI is transforming classrooms.

spk_0 In November of 2022, the tech company OpenAI released ChatGPT.

spk_0 It was met with excitement, big questions, and also worries about its potential impact on our lives and our jobs.

spk_0 And one of the biggest reactions came from educators.

spk_0 It's brand new. We weren't ready for this.

spk_0 My first reaction was absolutely panic.

spk_0 There's a lot of worry about what it's going to mean for our classrooms.

spk_0 I mean, it's a game changer, and it's just the first of its kind.

spk_0 I asked people how they'd use ChatGPT, and they'd use it for all kinds of things I hadn't expected.

spk_0 If we can find ways to teach kids, hey, how's that working?

spk_0 How could we improve it? I think that's a much better way than just saying.

spk_0 We're just going to ban all technology.

spk_0 Within two months of the launch, New York City's Department of Education put a block in place to limit its use.

spk_0 But soon after, the department changed its mind.

spk_0 And now, just three years later, the seven biggest districts in the country use ChatGPT or other AI products in some form.

spk_0 Some examples of what that looks like includes teachers using AI Chatbot-like products to come up with lessons,

spk_0 to build tests or quizzes, to then grade those tests or quizzes.

spk_0 That's Wahini Vara, a contributing writer for Bloomberg Business Week.

spk_0 And then students also are using these products to do things like plug in an essay and get writing feedback on it,

spk_0 or even chat with character chat bots based on historical figures that they've been learning about in class.

spk_0 Wahini has covered the tech industry for years, starting with early social media like Facebook.

spk_0 She's also used AI in her creative work.

spk_0 Earlier this year, she came out with a memoir called Searches that she partly used ChatGPT to create.

spk_0 And recently, she's been reporting on how tech companies have worked to get their products integrated into schools,

spk_0 and how AI is changing educational outcomes for kids.

spk_0 I started by asking Wahini to tell us why so many schools seem to have done a 180 on the use of AI in such a short amount of time.

spk_0 A couple of things happened all at once, I think, which led to this kind of perfect storm.

spk_0 So school districts over the past couple of years have faced unprecedented political challenges, financial challenges,

spk_0 in getting their teachers and students the resources that are actually proven to work, things like more teachers,

spk_0 being able to pay teachers more so that you can use those hours to provide them with professional development,

spk_0 like training to become better teachers.

spk_0 These are things that are shown to be effective, but they're expensive, and it takes a lot of political will.

spk_0 And there's a dearth of that right now.

spk_0 So that's the landscape at school districts.

spk_0 Into this landscape comes tech companies which have a lot of resources, unlike the public school system,

spk_0 and are invested in promulgating their AI products.

spk_0 And so what better way, if you're imagining a world 20 or 30 years from now, in which everybody's using AI chatbots,

spk_0 what better way to bring about that world than to make sure kids are getting exposed to AI chatbots

spk_0 and learning to use them, becoming familiar with them, maybe even becoming dependent on them,

spk_0 when they're in their public schools from the age of 5 to 18.

spk_0 The other thing is these companies are increasingly under pressure from governments, from policy makers, from the public,

spk_0 for making products with social harms.

spk_0 You see something in the news every day about something bad happening because of somebody's use of an AI chatbot.

spk_0 And so these companies too want to make the case that their products actually have social benefit too.

spk_0 And again, what better way to make that case than to be able to argue they're using our products in schools

spk_0 because this is going to improve students learning.

spk_0 So have we seen anything on this scale before in terms of tech influence on education?

spk_0 This is certainly part of a continuum.

spk_0 So starting especially in the early to mid 2000s, you saw companies like Google and Microsoft come up with these products like Google Classroom.

spk_0 That made technologies proliferate in schools.

spk_0 The thing that's different this time though, is the way in which the tech companies are working to bring their products into schools.

spk_0 So for example, Microsoft, OpenAI and other tech companies recently partnered with the second biggest teachers union in the country, the AFT,

spk_0 to create a $23 million AI teacher training institute that's going to offer training to teachers in how to use AI.

spk_0 That's unprecedented. Something like that has never happened before.

spk_0 The other major teachers union, the NEA, is also partnering with tech companies.

spk_0 These companies have also put a lot of money into nonprofits that spread the message that AI is.

spk_0 The future and schools need to bring it into the fold.

spk_0 And then these companies also have relationships directly with the schools now.

spk_0 In part because of these two decades of history they've now built such that a school district,

spk_0 when it has questions about how to use technology, will turn to the technology companies themselves and ask the New York District for example,

spk_0 right around the time that they were blocking chat GPT, they reached out to Microsoft and said,

spk_0 hey, we are getting a lot of questions about chat GPT.

spk_0 We don't really know what to do. Can you help us out here?

spk_0 And people from Microsoft flew out to New York and they had some conversations about AI.

spk_0 And pretty soon afterward the New York school district was saying,

spk_0 you know what? Actually, we think AI could be a helpful tool for our teachers and students.

spk_0 We want to bring this into the classroom. And they did.

spk_0 Well, I mean, so many of the questions about what it means for students or certainly what most people focus on in these conversations or engage with.

spk_0 What if anything do we know about how AI really impacts learning as an experience?

spk_0 Have there been any credible studies in this very short amount of time that it's been introduced?

spk_0 There have been some studies. There have not been long-term longitudinal studies in part because these kinds of products have been around for such a short period of time.

spk_0 Yeah, sure.

spk_0 But I did speak with Isabel Howe who runs the Stanford Accelerator for Learning at Stanford University,

spk_0 which maintains the sort of database of all the studies that are considered credible and peer-reviewed and well-sourced on this subject.

spk_0 And she says the research is still largely inconclusive.

spk_0 So there are a few studies that seem to show some learning benefits for students using AI.

spk_0 There are also studies emerging that seem to show detrimental effects for students.

spk_0 So students not being able to learn or think as well when they're using these products then when they are not.

spk_0 And I think the challenge here is just that we don't know.

spk_0 Like it's very possible that once the research comes in, we'll find out that these kinds of products are hugely beneficial for learning and teaching.

spk_0 But that research just isn't in yet and there certainly is a growing body of research that suggests otherwise.

spk_0 And just to move from your perspective as a technology reporter, what do you see as some of the potential negative consequences,

spk_0 whether we're seeing them bear out already or that you're kind of keeping your eyes out for?

spk_0 Well, typically when you're trying to decide what to do in a classroom, you look at the evidence of what has worked over the years.

spk_0 And then you try to get funding to implement those things that you know have worked.

spk_0 We don't typically think of the public school classroom as a place where it makes sense to test things that may or may not work.

spk_0 That might be harmful.

spk_0 And I'll name a couple of potential significant harms.

spk_0 One is that student privacy gets violated and student information is used to enrich big technology companies at the students expense.

spk_0 Another potential harm is that students in using these products lose the ability to think for themselves, to problem solve for themselves.

spk_0 And actually, frankly, maybe aren't learning the skills that they need to use to be successful in a future workforce if you want to frame it that way.

spk_0 The big overarching concern though, especially when you're talking about public schools, is the concern that big technology companies are successful when they use the technology companies.

spk_0 They make a profit for their investors. That's their measure of success.

spk_0 Their measure of success isn't our children in public schools across the United States and the world learning and thinking better.

spk_0 That is the concern of teachers and of public school districts, right?

spk_0 So if you take something that has traditionally been in the purview of people whose job it is to make sure students think and learn better and move it increasingly into the hands of tech companies who have a different goal.

spk_0 What are the consequences of that?

spk_0 Yeah, it almost feels like this is like the guinea pig era of seeing how it plays out in schools, frankly.

spk_0 I mean, it sounds like you spoke with one Philadelphia school district official who made the argument that, you know, no matter how you feel about AI tools.

spk_0 This is the world that these students are growing up in.

spk_0 This is the world they're going to graduate into. It's the world they're going to have to get jobs in.

spk_0 And it's their responsibility as educators to think about how to expose them to these tools responsibly and really teach them how to use them.

spk_0 What do you make of that argument?

spk_0 That was an argument I heard over and over, not just from the Philadelphia school district, but from districts across the country.

spk_0 Part of what interests me about that argument that school district officials make is that there's a guess built into it about what the future will be like, right?

spk_0 And that guess is we are moving into a future in which AI will transform the workforce.

spk_0 It happens to be, and maybe it's not so coincidental, also the argument that technology companies make when selling these products to schools, right?

spk_0 And so there's this way in which it seemed to me in my reporting that technology companies are building this vision for the future that is not absolutely going to come to pass, right?

spk_0 And then saying to schools, hey, this is the future. We know that this is the future. And so you need to train your students to be prepared for that future.

spk_0 Well, it turns out a lot of companies that are currently trying to use AI in the workforce are finding out that there aren't significant benefits.

spk_0 And some companies are now pulling back on their AI investment. And so there is a plausible world in which actually AI chatbots aren't the future.

spk_0 And that all this investment is not actually preparing students for the future world that they're moving into.

spk_0 And so I think it is important to sort of hold that possibility in mind as well.

spk_0 Well, let's talk about what you learned from visiting some classrooms where this is actually being used in practice.

spk_0 You spoke to one teacher in a school in Colorado whose name was State Fair Child.

spk_0 And it sounds like he really embraced the use of AI in his classroom, saw how it went over the course of a full year and that you checked in with him over that course of the year.

spk_0 Can you talk a little bit about what he was implementing in the classroom, what it looked like?

spk_0 Yeah. And I actually visited his classroom multiple times also. So I got to see it in person.

spk_0 What I appreciated about this teacher, a mate, fair child is that he was very transparent and open with his students about the questions he had about AI.

spk_0 So basically he went to his students and he said, hey, I'm going to have us use this product. It was called Magic School in the classroom.

spk_0 I don't know how it's going to go, but we're all going to see together how it goes.

spk_0 He gave them a 90 minute introduction to AI that he built himself that addressed all of the potential challenges and problems that we described as well as the potential benefits of using AI.

spk_0 And then he had them play around with it. When I visited his classroom, the students I talked to you said to me that they appreciated being able to use this platform Magic School to get feedback on their writing assignments, for example, before turning them in.

spk_0 So whereas they would previously turn in a writing assignment and lose a point because they had not addressed something the teacher had asked them to address.

spk_0 Now the chatbot would point out that they hadn't addressed that. They could go and fix it and then they could turn it in.

spk_0 And then the teacher theoretically could then make sort of higher level comments on their work rather than fixing their grammatical sentence structure.

spk_0 There were also a lot of challenges that I observed and that Mr. Fairchild observed as well.

spk_0 So every time I saw him introduce a new assignment in class, he would say, remember, this is not a person you're chatting with. This is a product. It makes mistakes. It can be biased.

spk_0 So make sure you double check everything. Well, I did sit in his classroom for multiple hours and observed students.

spk_0 And I quite rarely saw students actually double checking something that the chatbot spit out.

spk_0 I also saw the AI product make factual errors, put biases into its answers that the students didn't seem to notice.

spk_0 And that seemed problematic to me. And Mr. Fairchild said that that was problematic for him also.

spk_0 So he tended to view that as a potential learning experience. He thought that maybe in the future there could be a way to have students notice those things happening in real time and make more time in classroom discussion for that to be a jumping off point to talk about all the challenges with AI.

spk_0 On the other hand, you know, that's a really difficult thing to do. You've got 30 students in the classroom. If each of them is sort of chatting on their individual computers with a chatbot, some subset of those are seeing mistakes are seeing biases, but don't yet have the knowledge to recognize those mistakes and biases.

spk_0 It is a little difficult for me to see how it would then be possible for one teacher to be able to address all of that in real time. And I think Mr. Fairchild recognized that challenge also.

spk_0 It sounds like at the end of the year, Nate Fairchild was really trying to figure out how do I assess the impact of having used AI tools in the classroom this year.

spk_0 And he looked to some test results of how the students performed by the end of the year. What did the results say to him?

spk_0 So interestingly, it turned out that on this test of basically subject matter knowledge, the students generally seem to have done better than they'd done in past years.

spk_0 And then anecdotally, he also felt that they had improved their oral and written communication, even when they weren't using the chatbot for help.

spk_0 The interesting thing is though, he made very clear that he wasn't sure how much of that could be attributed to the product that they had been using magic school.

spk_0 And what he suspected instead was that there was a way in which he had changed his teaching that actually made the students learn and think better.

spk_0 And what he had changed was this. He knew that his students now had access to AI like a lot of teachers across the country know. And because of that, he changed the way in which he asked them to engage with the material they were learning.

spk_0 So rather than just saying, what does Ellie we sell say in these couple of pages of the book night, which you just read, he started to ask questions that were more like, read these couple of pages of night by Ellie we sell.

spk_0 And tell me about a time in your life when you experience something that feels related to Ellie we sell experience and how does reading night change your understanding of your experience.

spk_0 You would ask them to engage with their personal background their personal experiences. And it turns out that that is a proven method of engaging students more and thereby making students more successful in class because they're more interested they care more.

spk_0 And so what he realized in the end in a funny way is that what had actually happened was that he had done like the really hard difficult to scale work of becoming a better teacher himself.

spk_0 Right. Well, I'm curious to hear how it went for the students. Did you talk to the students about how the year felt for them what felt different about this classroom experience.

spk_0 The students found it exciting to be honest they thought it was kind of cool and subversive I think to be told in class yes, not only can you use these products, but we want you to use them.

spk_0 And we trust you to engage with the things that are problematic about using these products. I think that they did gain some AI literacy skills from the experiment.

spk_0 I think that had a lot a lot to do with the fact that they had a teacher who was very had educated himself deeply in how these products worked.

spk_0 And so I don't know that I came out of spending time with his students feeling particularly confident that that was something that could be replicated across the board because it had so much to do with this particular teacher in his approach.

spk_0 And did this teacher say whether he plans to continue using AI in the same way in the classroom and experiment worth continuing in his eyes.

spk_0 He does interestingly he hasn't and doesn't plan to use AI in the way that tech companies tend to market it to teachers, which is to write lesson plans to do grading.

spk_0 And he actually describes the work of like building a lesson, figuring out an assessment for that lesson, making a rubric for grading students based on that assessment.

spk_0 He describes that work as spiritual work, even use that adjective. And he said the connection between a teacher and a student exists within all that material. And I'm not ready to hand that off to a technology company that said he was really interested enough in the experiment he conducted this year that he did plan to do it next year as well.

spk_0 And next year he wants to build in more robust ways of having students engage with all the problems with AI too.

spk_0 Did you reach out to magic school about what you observed in the classroom, maybe some of the downsides that you heard from Nate.

spk_0 I did. Yeah. So the CEO of magic school was excited, obviously, about the proliferation of AI in schools. I did point out to him that I had noticed biases and inaccuracies creep into the students experiences with the products.

spk_0 And I said to him, you know, it seems that because magic school is using AI platforms from big technology companies like open AI and Google to provide its product, magic school itself doesn't have a lot of control over the appearance of inaccuracies and biases.

spk_0 Interestingly, he said, you're right. There's not that much we can do about it. He pointed out though that what the company does is it provides disclaimers in its products for teachers to see for students to see saying there might be inaccuracies and biases here.

spk_0 Make sure to double check what you see.

spk_0 Well, let's talk about another school that I guess you could say has really gone all in. It's called Alpha School. It's described as an AI powered school. It is a private school. It's K through 12. There are several locations.

spk_0 You visited a high school campus in Austin, Texas. Can you just tell us what that school was like? I mean, there's so many things that are different about this classroom setup than a traditional school setup.

spk_0 Yeah, where do I start? So the school describes itself as squeezing all the learning that you would typically do in like a six hour school day into two hours.

spk_0 So that the rest of the day is freed up for work on what they call life skills and work on individual pursuits. What I saw when I visited this high school in the morning was kids sitting at individual computers with headphones over their ears, sort of working individually on totally different subjects while sitting kind of close to each other.

spk_0 There were no teachers in sight because instead of teachers, the school employees, these people called guides who are adults who are called guides in part because they don't have teaching certification, at least in the school I visited.

spk_0 One of them had a background in HR, one had a background as a corporate lawyer, one had a background in marketing. These were the three guides I met.

spk_0 And their job was to like mill around and offer moral support. I spoke to one guide who was standing next to somebody a student who was studying calculus and pointed at her and was like, I haven't studied calculus in like seven years. I have no idea.

spk_0 And if the student who was sitting there studying calculus needed help with calculus, there was this AI chatbot that she could pull up on her screen. Now the school interestingly later said it got rid of those AI chatbots because students could use them to cheat.

spk_0 But that was what they were using at the time. In the afternoon, the students could work on individual pursuits. What was interesting about the school though was that as it happened every project that I learned about over and over tended to be an AI startup that each of these kids was starting.

spk_0 So all the possible individual pursuits one could do, you know, one student for example was working on a startup in which AI stuffed animals would offer mental health advice to teenagers.

spk_0 Another was building this app where an AI chatbot would give advice to teenagers about how to put more Riz in their text messages to other teens. I asked McKenzie Price, the co-founder of the school.

spk_0 If there were examples, she could share of like non AI startup life pursuits or projects that these students were trying out. And the one that came to mind for her was a student who was writing a musical.

spk_0 And as we talked more about this musical, she explained that this student was using AI to write the musical.

spk_0 So, you know, it's a very specific idea of what school is for what the role of AI could be at school. And one thing that's really important to note that I think has gotten lost in a lot of the coverage of the school is that in my reporting, I learned that the school has actually been functioning as a subsidiary of a big technology company in Austin called Trilogy.

spk_0 And that company is building a lot of the products used at the school. So, if you're a student in this school, you are being educated by a subsidiary of a tech company and using products of that tech company in your education.

spk_0 So, I asked McKenzie Price about the relationships among these different companies. And what she said was, it's high time that we do something different in education.

spk_0 And I believe that allowing capital and industry to go into education is hopefully something that's going to work.

spk_0 I want to go back to your own relationship with tech and how that's evolved over time. You have a book out this year called searches. It's a memoir. It's about your life, specifically. It's about your digital life.

spk_0 And it's mixed with your dialogues with chat GPT. And as the book goes on, you start to probe more and more about the nature of chat GPT's rhetoric with you.

spk_0 How it tends to flatter you. Sure, people have noticed this a lot. How it tends to agree with you. But also how it has a particularly authoritative tone in delivering its responses.

spk_0 Even if those responses are not always based in fact or without bias, can you talk a little bit more about that aspect, the tone of some of these chat bots and what that means, especially for young people.

spk_0 Yeah. I mean, the question is, why does it matter? Right. And in my experience writing my book, what I wanted to show was one facet of why it matters. So what happens is I open the book with this dialogue with chat GPT saying,

spk_0 I want to share some of my writing with you and get feedback. And then over the course of the book, I'm feeding it to chapters at a time and it's giving me feedback on those two chapters.

spk_0 Amid doing all that, it also starts to suggest as it's giving me feedback that I write a book that is more positive about big technology companies that is more positive about AI. And at even at one point suggests a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs that I should include about Sam Altman, the CEO of open AI,

spk_0 which is the company behind chat GPT in which it describes them in these like glowing glowing terms as this visionary leader who wants to make the world a better place. And it's saying to me, you should put this in your book. Now to be clear, I have no idea why the chat bot produced language like that.

spk_0 I don't have any evidence that open AI or tech companies in general are deliberately building their products to spout positive rhetoric about tech companies. But that certainly happened in my dialogue. And it's certainly something that could be hypothetically possible. Right.

spk_0 And so the question is in a world in which kids who don't yet know how to write and are in school because they're learning to write are using chat bots to get feedback on their writing to what extent are the ideological and financial goals of the companies behind these products going to infect not only the students essays, but actually the students way of thinking about the world.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 What's on your mind now as the school year gets underway. What should we as people as parents as educators be keeping in mind as this relationship between schools and tech companies continues to deepen.

spk_0 I mean, listen, I'm not an educator and I know it's a really tough job. I am a parent and I can say that I would hope that teachers and school districts think first about what they know based on evidence is going to serve my child's education well.

spk_0 And then muster the resources, the political will to deliver those things to my child. I would hope that the starting point is what do we know about what works. What does the research tell us let's do those things because I think part of the reason we're having this conversation in the first place isn't that school districts went out and looked at all their body of research and found that AI is having really impressive results with students. And so they're implementing it at schools.

spk_0 What's happening is something else entirely. And so I would urge school districts to go back to that sort of fundamental approach of seeing what works and then implementing the things that work.

spk_0 And I can imagine a future with AI in which teachers on an individual basis are thinking about ways to build AI in in a way that allows students to improve their quote unquote literacy with AI understand the harms.

spk_0 Understand the potential benefits understand how to use it better understand really like the socio political context though for AI the way I think some great teachers are doing with social media now without saying this means that we should be using AI in the classroom as a product every day.

spk_0 Hmm. Hmm. Why any thank you so much for this conversation so it's really interesting thank you for talking to me and I enjoyed it.

spk_0 Why any of our story for Bloomberg Business Week how chatbots and AI are already transforming kids classrooms is on Apple news. We'll link to it in our show notes page.

spk_0 And if you're listening in the news app, we'll queue it up to play for you next.

spk_0 Yeah.

Schools blocked ChatGPT. Now they embrace it. What changed?

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