Data Privacy and Security: AI systems collect and analyse a significant amount of personal data from students and educators. Ensuring the privacy and security of this data, as well as protecting against potential breaches, is a significant concern.
Ethical Use of AI: Educators and developers need to consider the ethical implications of AI in education, such as bias in algorithms, misinformation, copyright issues, and plagiarism. Striking a balance between AI-driven innovation and responsible use is essential.
Access to Technology: Not all students have equal access to technology and AI-driven resources. Students can be disadvantaged if they don’t have access to AI tools or the necessary technology.
Teacher and Student Over Reliance: There is a risk that teachers and students may become overly dependent on AI for teaching and learning, potentially diminishing critical thinking skills and personal interaction in the classroom.
Bias: As generative AI uses algorithms created by human designers, there is a strong potential for the introduction of bias into the system. Bias occurs where results or outputs from an AI system are disproportionately in favour of or against an idea, group or person.
Some examples include providing only a limited perspective, showing racial and gender biases. As generative AI uses large data sets, historical and systemic biases are introduced into the system. AI bias is similar to human biases and can lead to inaccurate decisions. The issue of AI bias arises when an algorithm draws conclusions that are too narrow or based on training datasets that do not accurately reflect the population under study.
Inaccuracy: As generative AI draws from large data sets, it is not guaranteed to be accurate as not all information on the internet is accurate. AI is only as good as the data that is fed into the machine learning algorithms. Additionally, generative AI is not necessarily coded to provide accurate information, rather it simply predicts the type of information needed to best fit a given Prompt.
Plagiarism: A common concern from educators is that generative AI and other AI technologies will be used by students to write essays and complete assignments.
Copyright/ Licensing Unknowns: Understanding copyright laws is an important element of using generative AI and other AI technology in the classroom, in that as this is new technology, there are not clear boundaries regarding who owns the content generated by AI. As companies continue to develop licenses on their products, it is important for educators to reflect on the implications of copyright/licensing unknowns.