“Is That Real?” - The Question I Dread Most as an Educator
There is a lot of fear-mongering surrounding AI and the impact it will have on the next generation. Beyond environmental concerns, there are implications surrounding consent, autonomy, and overall “brain rotting.” As a young teacher, I wanted to consider myself a progressive on this front. Yes, I harbor worries regarding the environment and depleting creativity, but AI seems to be everywhere (hello, Superbowl ads). When my school rolled out an AI program designed to help teachers, I was hesitantly on board. If we had the resource available, why not try to make the best of it?
MagicSchool is a platform for educators with a myriad of features. It became handy when I needed some quick activity or knowledge check ideas, or to rewrite text at a more accessible level with a Spanish glossary. Some features I was wary of gathered dust in my computer - why would I need AI to provide feedback on student writing? Frankly, after poor experiences with LitLab.ai decodables, I never wanted to use this technology to make something student facing. There is too much risk in what the children would be receiving.
After a few months of dabbling with this tool for teacher-facing materials, I decided suddenly to stop after an uptick in a specific question.
“Ms. Blouin, is that real life?”
I was surprised to hear it from fifth grade. In our unit about the solar system, we watched a video of constellations moving through the sky from our vantage point on Earth. Now, I’m fully aware that I am teaching in an urban environment. You walk outside at night, and there is not a single star visible. The sight of the universe around us in all its glory is truly unreal. However, the students became convinced I was showing them an AI graphic of what the stars would look like. It took showing them a picture of the night sky in the famous New York blackout for them to be confident what I was showing them was real.
I had never considered that the students wouldn’t trust what I was presenting. How could they? With teachers being encouraged to leverage AI in lesson plans, an AI afterschool class, and nearly every school-wide poster generated by AI, no wonder the students feel they can’t trust what they see, even in school.
Frequently, students bring me TikToks or pictures to ask me if it is real or not. I can tell that the horse jumping on a trampoline is not real, but these videos have gotten extremely convincing. I even catch myself scrolling back verify reality, and I grew up in a generation raised on technological literacy.
Pictures of animals, scientific phenomena, and resources shared onscreen are now subject to scrutiny. The students can no longer discern reality, but I can’t blame them. I am inundated with artificially generated references I am supposed to implement in my practice, spelling errors and all. I was so disturbed by this phenomenon I decided to scrub the use of AI from my practice entirely. At this point, I don’t think there is an ethical way to implement it. At least, not without massive overhaul and regulation, especially on social media networks children are exposed to.
For next year, I’ve proposed a computer science class. My hope is not only to teach basic computer skills, but base level media literacy. In a world where we can trust less and less, giving the next generation the tools to protect themselves is crucial. For now, I’ll have to keep convincing students that yes, what they see in my class is real.
