Gongol.com Archives: August 2025
August 3, 2025
An AI do-and-don't list for teachers - part 1
The school year typically begins in earnest in mid-August, and one of the hot topics for teachers this school year will be the reach of artificial intelligence tools both inside and outside the classroom. As with every other new piece of educational technology, there are good ways and bad ways to put it to use. Some recommendations follow. ■ DON'T tell students that artificial intelligence will replace the jobs they want. Technological change always causes changes to the labor force, but very few jobs are eliminated entirely. Telling young people their hoped-for careers will be replaced is discouraging -- and even labor economists rarely dare to predict the future with that much certainty. ■ DO tell students to look for opportunities to maximize the gap between what they have to give up to have a career and what they get back in reward. Encourage them to think about the path to a "dream job" as a series of opportunities that require trade-offs, like spending time in college, climbing a seniority ladder, or sacrificing other opportunities. On the other side, people are rewarded with more than just money: Social approval, work-life balance, respect, and many other factors are involved. The difference between what you get and what you give up to get it is what matters. ■ DON'T vilify all artificial intelligence tools equally. As with every technology, there are good and bad uses, which depend on the character of the user. (Even a kitchen knife can be used to lovingly prepare a meal or to commit cold-blooded murder.) ■ DO explain the limits of the usefulness of all technological tools, using real terms. Machine learning has the potential to do extraordinary things when large volumes of data are involved, as in medical research. But it also has the capacity to create terrible pain to real people when it's used to do truly ghoulish things like generating spammy obituaries. ■ DON'T promote unquestioning faith in the answers generated by artificial intelligence tools. Just because Google and other high-profile services are nudging people to use their AI tools doesn't make them more trustworthy or credible. It only means they're potentially profitable. ■ DO show students how to incorporate AI-generated content into a careful search process, including how to cross-reference among sources and how to independently verify what is often served with great authority. Show examples of dangerous and stupid errors that can and should be checked by humans, like obvious biographical and historical errors, scientific mistakes, or falsified reporting.
