AI chatbots hurt Canadian teens’ education, says McGill prof

A McGill University teacher is warning Canadians of the negative impact of chatbots on teen education.

In a piece published on The Conversation, Adam Kenneth Dubé, associate professor of Learning Sciences at McGill’s Faculty of Education, wrote about some of the harmful effects that he’s been studying.

As he explains, new worldwide data on 15-year-olds’ science, math and reading ability was released last month by OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In Canada, 24,600 students from 897 schools took part, with this year’s report focusing on their use of AI in learning.

Notably, the report found that 86 per cent of teens globally use AI for school, and Canadian teens who use AI every week for school scored two years behind those who never use it. Dubé adds that scores have overall been declining for years, coinciding with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, although he stresses that this in itself isn’t evidence of causality.

Instead, he looked further into how and why Canadian students are turning to AI. Here were some of the biggest use cases:

• “To help me learn” (38 per cent in Canada, 46 per cent globally)
• To research new topics (23 per cent in Canada, 31 per cent globally)
• To summarize a reading (23 per cent in Canada, 30 per cent globally)
• To generate texts for assignments (18 per cent in Canada, 29 per cent globally)

Given that AI is notorious for making mistakes, also known as “hallucinations,” these findings are unfortunate, to say the least. It’s particularly concerning that roughly one-fifth of Canadian teens are effectively using AI to do their homework for them, too. Naturally, relying more and more on AI will also reduce critical-thinking skills in general, as we saw in a study earlier this year by Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford and UCLA.

Overall, Dubé says the data shows that teens are using AI to “help them learn, not cheat, and are driven by curiosity.” But he also noted that the data “suggests using AI doesn’t help most teens with their learning, particularly Canadians.”

For instance, students who use AI daily to summarize text showed a 38-point lower score in science versus those who never use it. Worse, those who used it to draft text demonstrated a 42-point lower score. Dubé says these gaps are equivalent to two years of learning loss. He also noted that even results for those who were “trained” in AI use didn’t differ much from those who never used AI (two points lower in Canada, five points higher globally).

Going forward, he says it’s important to design “teen-ready AI” instead of training teens to be “AI-ready.” This includes an overhaul of Canada’s Safe Social Media Act to introduce greater restrictions, rather than features that encourage repeated use.

“If AI is reading and writing for you, then you’re not learning,” writes Dubé.

Via: The Conversation