Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming popular with students and teachers | Wilnesh News

Many polls show that the American public as a whole remains on the fence about artificial intelligence, but in education, adoption among teachers and students is rising rapidly.

In a little more than a year, the proportion of teachers who said they were familiar with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s breakthrough generative artificial intelligence chatbot backed by Microsoft and soon to be available on Apple’s iPhone, rose from 55% to 79%. , according to data, increased from 37% to 75% a new poll In May, sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation Impact Research and Learn Engineering Virtual Academyartificial intelligence laboratory.

There was a similar surge in actual usage, with 46% of teachers and 48% of students saying they use ChatGPT at least weekly, with student usage up 27 percentage points from last year.

Perhaps most notably, student reviews were generally positive. 70% of K-12 students have a favorable opinion of artificial intelligence chatbots. Among undergraduate students, this proportion rises to 75%. Among parents, 68% have a favorable opinion of artificial intelligence chatbots

“It was a lot more positive data than I expected,” said Ethan Mollick, a professor at Penn’s Wharton School, an expert on artificial intelligence and author who reviewed the polling data.

The poll data is consistent with the experience of Khan Academy and its founder, Sal Khan, who has spent the past year working with the Newark, New Jersey, school district and others to test the use of customized ChatGPT education Khanmigo. Khan recently told CNBC that its AI tool will expand from 65,000 students to 1 million students next year. It was also recently announced that Microsoft is paying to provide artificial intelligence to teachers across the United States for free. (The district pays per student for use, most recently $35 per user, though Khan said that price could potentially drop to the $10 to $20 range as the technology expands.)

“Unlike most of the ‘nice-to-haves’ in technology and education in the past, I think this is a ‘must-have’ for a lot of teachers,” Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, recently told CNBC Squawk Box”.

While Khan Academy is best known for its educational videos, OpenAI executives Sam Altman and Greg Brockman targeted its interactive exercise platform early on when they were looking for partners to pilot ChatGPT and provide socially positive use cases.

Morik said adoption rates in education are higher than in current workplaces, and it’s students, who have a high incentive to seek help, who “drug teachers with them.”

In fact, teachers were the only group surveyed to see a year-on-year decline in their favorable opinion, although a majority (59%) still have a positive view of AI chatbots.

Older teachers and parents (45+) are less likely to be confident in their ability to use AI effectively, but Khan said that’s one of the reasons Microsoft and its nonprofits want to make AI accessible to every educator in the United States. Its use saves teachers time.

Khan recently told CNBC that in the past, teachers were often told “it would be great if you could just learn this little extra thing…” which became a burden on already overworked educators. “Teachers are already very fragmented. Especially with these teacher tools, it’s another thing to learn,” he said. But so far, Khan’s research on school districts has saved teachers 5-10 hours a week. “This is the first time in our technology journey that we can tell teachers, ‘This is going to reduce what you have to do. Yes, there’s a little learning curve, but it’s going to save you time.'”

Only 25% of teachers surveyed said they had received training on AI chatbots, and about one-third (32%) cited a lack of training and professional development as the main reason they did not use AI. Teachers say they have used AI to generate ideas for the classroom (37%); for lesson planning and material preparation (32%); for student worksheets or examples (32%); and to create quizzes or tests (31%).

Mollick said he is optimistic about the use of artificial intelligence in education in the long term, but in the short term, he said these results are relatively high compared with past polls related to the introduction of new technologies. “I was a little surprised to see that the numbers looked as good as they actually did. I was surprised by the positive sentiment from every group,” he said. “It wasn’t universally loved, but we didn’t see the strong negative impact that we normally see,” he said.

It’s still early. Khan noted in a recent CNBC interview that the first directive should be to never prioritize technology over use cases. Over the past 15 years, he said, some school districts “have been able to achieve results significantly faster because of technology, but in many other cases, they purchased iPads and laptops and they’re gathering dust.”

New data also shows significant equity in the use of artificial intelligence in education. Minority groups adopt artificial intelligence for education at a higher rate, including teachers and parents who use artificial intelligence to help their children. Black and Hispanic K-12 students and undergraduates are more likely to use artificial intelligence in schools. Among parents, 47% want more use of AI chatbots in schools, while 36% want less use. Support for the use of artificial intelligence in education is higher among black (57%) and Hispanic parents (55%).

Mollick said it was too early to try to conclusively piece together economic and equity data — private school students are the most likely to use AI both personally and in school — but added it was worth digging deeper into the data to ask artificial intelligence Can wisdom fill the existing gaps in the school system. “Now people can hire AI tutors and don’t have to pay for them,” he said.

Khan says classroom AI is a personal expansion that matches his organization’s founding story, when he personally tutored his cousin Nadia. He recently told CNBC that artificial intelligence “can bring us closer to that ideal, combined with everything we’ve done over the years, to be able to emulate what a great mentor would do.” “In my opinion, it passes the Turing test,” Khan said, citing famed British mathematician and artificial intelligence pioneer Alan Turing’s goal that computer intelligence be the same as human intelligence without humans being able to recognize each other. “It’s no different than when I texted Nadia in 2004.”

Artificial intelligence and cheating

The findings raise many questions for educators and parents.

The value of classroom lectures is uncertain when students can get all their information from AI, but the accuracy of AI compared to teachers, while generally good, remains an open question, Molik said. “We need to proceed with caution,” he said.

Nearly 20% of teachers surveyed said ChatGPT had a negative impact, up from 7% last year.

Although online cheating is nothing new, it is impossible to discuss the use of artificial intelligence in education without including its use in cheating. “It’s easy for students to cheat,” Molik said, because there’s so much homework to do and not enough time to finish it. Historically, homework has been shown to improve student performance, but with the rise of online cheating, this link has worsened, and artificial intelligence may further reduce the value of homework.

K-12 students surveyed said they are most likely to use AI chatbots to write essays and other assignments (56%), followed by studying for tests and quizzes (52%).

Khan recently told CNBC that the way its next-generation AI tutoring system works is by keeping students within its walls, such as when writing a paper, the AI ​​is able to identify whether progress on an assignment can be attributed to the student and report any cheating to the teacher signs.

The new surveillance system will pose its own set of questions and provide students with new ways to bypass inspections, Mollick said.