‘An open approach to AI’ – God-like in the TES

Good to have been commissioned by TES – the Time Educational Supplement – to write a piece translating the four-point AI Transparency Statement that God-like begins with into the education context. You can read it here.

The idea is simple: rather than ‘AI is terrible, and we’re banning it,’ a means by which teachers can get students to be open about how they might have used it – and for teachers to model this by themselves being open about how they have used it to create resources or plans:

Providing this checklist to students can allow them to be transparent about where they’ve used generative AI in a clear and concise manner. It sets clear parameters on what the different uses of AI are.

It also gives teachers the ability to make it clear which type of use is allowed for different pieces of work – rather than having a free-for-all or total ban.

This checklist could work for teachers, too, in modelling the same openness and being clear with students where they have used AI in preparing lessons or schemes of work.

Moreover, for senior leaders this could help to set some parameters that they may wish to use when creating communications to parents or putting new policies online. It could bring some sense of transparency and ethical clarity over a technology where so much discourse is negative.

Not only will attempting to ban AI not work, it won’t prepare students for the world of work they’ll be going into, where smart use of the technology will be required.

I’ve written for TES quite a bit over the years, and it’s nice to be back in their pages. In fact, there’s another piece from TES that makes it into the book – a major feature I wrote for them not long before Covid, with Trevor Marchand – a Professor of Anthropology – about the flattening of the experience of learning as screens became more common. Then Covid hit and… that flattening accelerated.

As I write in God-like, ‘brain is hand, and hand is brain’ – and if we mess with that, we’re in trouble:

Thanks again for all your support for the book. If you are able to leave a review, that’d be so much appreciated.