AI & the Future of Education by University of Toronto Professor Paolo Granata

07Sep23

Paolo Granata is the director of the Media Ethics Lab at the University of Toronto. What makes us human in an age of AI? Professor Granata believes that AI – a new medium, a new language, a new information environment – holds the potential to enhance human agency and to reimagine the future of education.

The Media Ethics Lab is a research hub at the University of Toronto that studies the ways that digital media practices and emerging technologies are marked by ethical issues and decisive political, societal and cultural questions: http://mediaethics.ca 00:00

Intro 00:48 From the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Turing Galaxy
03:48 AI is not a Tool, it’s an Environment
05:00 Content matters, but context more so
08:00 Algorithmic learning vs Heuristic Learning

“Human vs. AI: Who’s Teaching Whom?

As the new academic year is about to start at the University of Toronto, I’d like to share my take on AI and the Future (and present) of Education. Like water to a fish, AI is the medium in which we are immersed now. It’s impact is ecological, it involves the entire human-technology ecosystem. AI is not a tool, AI is creating a new human environment.
So, here’s the thing: it’s not just about ChatGPT doing homework for students. The real danger is that we created a system where students must become like ChatGPT to successfully complete a course. The fact that students may be tempted to use IA tools to breeze through their coursework is the concrete evidence of the limited demand for creativity. In many disciplines students are not required to use their creativity or imagination to pass a course, they have to just follow the recipe, executing the algorithm given to them. This is not nurturing intellectual growth: this is just manufacturing educational conformity.
It seems we have created a system where similarity is rewarded, and originality is often overlooked. Is this what we really want education to become?

I believe that Generative AI is showing us the failure of this kind of algorithmic learning, the failure of this standardized and homogenized learning model. ChatGPT is actually showing us that it’s time to question, to reconsider, to shift from algorithmic learning to *heuristic learning*, a model that celebrates the joy of discovery, that encourages self-learning, self-assessment, an exploratory approach that fosters not just reasoning, but also creativity, imagination, education as a wellspring of wellbeing.”

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