Okay, a little up front confession. I am a retired teacher, boot maker by trade, professional driver by circumstance and lots of other things in between, including a stint in IT. I have some rather prejudicial views about technology, particularly tech in the classroom.

For what I do at home, surf around the Net, make noises on platforms like Deviant Art, Imgur and here, the technologies I use are great. Following Umberto Ecco’s comment about the village idiot being able to reach a much wider audience over social media, I get to scream into the void occasionally, and sometimes I get some great responses, other times, not, but that not my problem. What is happening with Ai though, that is more than a little concerning, and that is way outside what I would use tech for.

This, essentially means I am more than a little suspicious of Ai, and the uses it can be put to.

First, I suggest we need to be very cautious about using Ai across any field, but for this I am going to restrict my comments to education and creative arts.

In Australia, we have had nothing but contempt for our First Nations, being the primitive, socially backward, technologically stone aged people they were.We have always overlooked the fact that the technologies they used were clever innovations, some, clearly genius adaptations, to the harshest environments, most dangerous imaginable, in total isolation. Their environment was their classroom.

Today, our classrooms are using a technology that is actually very similar. In the past, classrooms have adapted technology to suit the purposes of education. Chalk boards to charcoal pens and paper. By the 20th Century, pencils and ink pens, using 16mm films, to television and overhead projectors, adoption of biros, and by the mid-1960’s, the very first mechanical calculators, to be replaced a decade later with simple electronic calculators. White boards replacing chalk boards. Yet, if we looked, it was with calculators that we can see the first rumblings of the impact of technologies in the classroom.

Calculators were the first tools used in the classroom that took away the most vital component of education. Students could rely upon something other than their own brain to achieve a goal. Why know how to calculate mathematical problems if I have a machine to do it for me.

Skipping a couple of decades, we saw the introduction of the first computers to the classroom and the game has changed forever. It has taken thirty years, but I have to ask if there is a classroom that survives without using a laptop? I doubt it. The problem is that as the tech became more insidious, and joined with mobile (cell) phones, is there any reason today for kids to actually learn anything other than how to search the Web?

Why put kids through the mental gymnastics required to learn how to think when they have their laptops and phones to do it for them. Now with the addition of Ai, why is there a need to learn to write? To understand the structure of language? I saw a lament the other day about how good old Aussie slang is falling into disuse. Given the international nature of the Internet, are we surprised? Dialects form in isolation, and we are no longer isolated from the rest of the world.

The problem, for me, is that every technology has been adapted to the classroom, but not computers. Classrooms are being forced to adapt to computers and that, ultimately, cannot be a good thing. Add Ai into the mix and we’re drifting into seriously darkened waters.

Ai was supposed to be a predictive text editor, but in the last few years it has become an awful lot more. Images, photographs, videos even, can be made using Ai tools. Deep fakes they have been labelled, and that must be sending shivers up the spines of our lawmakers around the world. Essentially, whatever laws are made to limit Ai and the use of Ai imagery, they will not stop anyone from using those tools for a corrupt purpose. No matter how harsh we make the laws, how can our laws be enforced if a terrorist government, like the US for example, decides they want to discredit a particular politician, or government.

Using the CIA like they used to, becomes risky, easier to detect, but using the media and the Internet, governments will fall. We only have to consider the Russian bots working overtime during the 2024 US election, or the Brexit campaign. What if they have videos of high officials engaging in gross misconduct? How can we prove these are deep fakes? We can’t. That’s what’s so scary about Ai, the abuses that people will put it to. Forget Skynet, it’s people we need be afraid of.