Teachers Concerned About The Impact Of AI In The Classroom
While the majority of teachers polled by NPR/Ipsos said they use AI to help with work tasks, they’re hesitant to actually use it as a teaching tool.
Black News 
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has quickly become a hot-button issue in the United States. Despite corporations shoving AI down our throats whenever possible, more and more people are rejecting the technology and the data centers that fuel it. These concerns about AI have now reached the classroom, where teachers are worried about how the technology will affect students’ learning and critical thinking skills.
A poll conducted by NPR/Ipsos found that 54% of polled teachers are concerned that AI makes it harder for people to think for themselves. These concerns are valid, as several studies have already been conducted showing that people who regularly depend on AI chatbots show reduced critical thinking skills, creativity, and attention spans.
“I think students who aren’t already intrinsically self-motivated to be critical thinkers, like that top 1% of the class … I think people who are not already that personality type, we’re going to see those critical thinking skills atrophy over time,” Christa Corricelli, a special-education teacher at Saugus Middle/High School, told NPR.
“We’re in an environment where teachers feel like this is going to fundamentally reshape the future of education moving forward,” Mallory Newall, a senior vice president at Ipsos, told NPR. “They have serious concerns about AI’s impact on how they relate to their students and how students relate to each other.”
Michele Naber, a veteran biology teacher at El Toro High School in Orange County, Calif., told NPR that she uses AI in the classroom to teach students how to properly enter prompts and to verify their accuracy. One example Naber gave NPR is that she’ll tell students to ask ChatGPT to describe an animal, and they’ll compare the description it gives with how the animal actually looks and note how things the chatbot gets wrong.
“That’s one of the things that has to be taught: You can’t take it literally,” Naber says.
While the majority of teachers polled expressed concerns about the role AI could play in the classroom, 60% of the respondents said they use AI as a tool to help with work tasks. Naber told NPR that she uses AI tools to help generate answers for multiple-choice tests.
“That’s something that normally, as a teacher, would have taken you probably upwards of an hour … and it minimized the entire task to five minutes. That’s helpful,” Naber explained.
While teachers are concerned about the us of AI by students, what’s been interesting is how roundly Gen Z seems to be pushing back against AI on their own. This year’s college graduations featured several commencement speakers receive a chorus of boos anytime they embraced AI. Graduates from an Arizona community college had their ceremony derailed by a malfunctioning AI reader.
While we’ve seen older filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky and Martin Scorsese embrace AI, 20-year-old Backrooms director Kane Parsons gave a fairly succinct read of the technology in a recent interview.
“I think I’m in the same boat as most well-adjusted people,” Parsons told the outlet. “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.”
It makes sense that young folks are rejecting AI, as it has already had negative effects on the youth beyond impacting their learning abilities. A group of teenage girls has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, after its AI chatbot Grok was used to create sexually explicit images of them without their consent.
“xAI chose to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children, despite knowing full well the consequences of creating such a dangerous product,” Vanessa Baehr-Jones, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
Whether it’s teachers, students, or artists, no one is terribly enthused about the corporate-driven AI future. They keep telling us that AI is inevitable, but what happens if only a limited few really embrace it?
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