At the end of last year I took part in an open course The 12 days of AI in order to try out for myself some of the potential for educational activities and also share with a community of academic explorers. A series of activities were available with a range of tools and suggestions, a shared MS Teams space and facilitation provided by the University of the Arts, London. On the final day we were asked to summarise our reflections:

“On the final day of the 12 days of AI, we invite you to pause and reflect on the insights, information and ethical considerations surrounding the usage of AI in education.”

I have now returned to complete my reflections in this blog post. Meanwhile I noticed a post from Maha Bali which I wanted to take the time to consider prior to committing to my blog post. As always she makes excellent points and encourages a deeper dive into the interactions between tech use and ethics.

As I always do when taking part in any learning/conference, I kept my own google doc as well as submitting posts to the VLE. This is an approach I would advise to any student, even if you just populate the doc with screenshots of your submissions. This way you avoid losing your learning when you finish your course. Looking back I can see that I experienced the usual AI headaches:

• swapping personal data for access. In some cases (voice/deep fakery) I refused to take part as the stakes were too high.
• AI mirages and hallucinations: people with implausable numbers or positions of limbs for example.
• Lack of transparency in terms of the resources used to come up with generated outputs

Between doing the course and writing this today the world is yet again experiencing devastating climate crises. The US has not escaped these of course. The UK’s new Science and Technology Secretary has made some extreme claims about the possibilities of AI which match some of the worst rhetoric we have had from tech in decades. I hope someone gives him a reality check as part of his consultation.

I had fun doing the 12 days of AI activities. However I find myself quite firmly in Maha’s camp of people with ethical problems with AI and I would like to see greater regulation and transparency in this area. Otherwise we are quite literally fiddling whilst Rome (and our planet) burns. I have a little postcard on my desk it reads “Tout est possible”. Yes, everything may be possible but not everything is desirable. The judgements we make should be informed by a full picture. We have to weigh up costs and benefits honestly and without bias or risk placing humanity on the road to extinction.

I am therefore creating this artefact without AI as a way of capturing my reflections as a human into the dangers of reducing human input into eduction. A selection of photos of human learning experiences taken over the past 10 years. Nothing artificial about the intelligences featured here.