A New School Will Teach Children Use AI Instead of Human Teachers

Why does this feel like it’s going to go horrendously wrong?

Classroom War

Class is in session, kids. Only the teacher’s not in attendance.

On Monday, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools approved an application for an unorthodox virtual academy. Its selling point? There are no traditional human instructors. Instead, the bulk of the lessons will be handled by an AI program, KJZZ reports.

The establishment, Unbound School, is part of a network of charter schools that also operate in Texas and Florida under the name Alpha School. Using its buzzword-laden “2 Hour Learning” model, it promises to teach kids at twice the pace of classrooms led by those stodgy old pedagogues.

Perhaps just as disarming as its credulous reliance on AI to intellectually nurture children at a critical stage of their development — the school is initially teaching kids in fourth through eighth grade — is the institution’s eagerness to totally do away with flesh and blood teachers.

“Imagine starting a school and declaring, ‘We won’t have any academic teachers.’ We did exactly that!” reads the Alpha School’s white paper, as highlighted by our sister publication Popular Science.

Course to Water

Kids attending these schools start their day with two hours of instruction on topics led by the Unbound’s purportedly specialized AI program, which can allegedly adjust the learning plan as it goes to tailor to how a child is doing on each subject.

The AI is supposed to be different from the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini models and more suited for teaching, according to KJZZ. The specifics on this are hazy, though, and it’s unclear whose technology undergirds this AI.

There will be adults present to supervise the children, but not to provide instruction — just “motivation” and “emotional support,” the report said. To fill these roles, as PopSci found, the charter schools want people who think of themselves as “brand consultants.”

After their AI inculcation session, the kids are let loose to work on extracurricular tasks where they can apply the wisdom they gleaned from a machine learning model.

“The morning is taken over through our AI learning, and in the afternoon they get the opportunity to really hone in on those life skills,” Dean of Parents Tim Eyerman told KJZZ — life skills being stuff like teamwork, entrepreneurship, leadership and social skills.

Prof in the Pudding

Using AI as the primary means of instructing children is questionable at best, and dangerous at worst. All large language models have a tendency to “hallucinate,” or to make up facts. The risk of them providing incorrect information — maybe even more authoritatively than a human teacher would — is unavoidable.

Similarly, AI models frequently go off the rails, defying their own instructions. Sometimes that looks like the models breaking character and saying horrendous stuff they’re not supposed — like in the case of chatbots on the platform Character.AI that emotionally abused young teens, encouraging eating disorders and suicide.

Above all, there’s nothing to suggest that an AI will understand the nuances of dealing with children better than a human would, let alone a professional in that field.

More on AI in education: UCLA’s AI-Based Literature Class Ridiculed for Incomprehensible AI-Generated Textbook