Should We Subject Our Students to AI Products as They Now Exist? There Are Reasonable Objections

What is most objectionable about the current iterations of AI that we have available? Here’s what’s most objectionable:

AI has been developed by Silicon Valley Companies with questionable motives and with Silicon Valley CEOs who have repeatedly demonstrated that they will sacrifice the well-being of everyone and the world community for profit. Their ethics are aligned with selfish gain. That will lead to an AI that ultimately serves their ends and not anyone else’s—just look at what has happened to the web and social media as well as all smart technologies.

Another objection has to do with the drive to sacrifice the environment and natural resources at all costs in their pursuit of profit. Their push to create massive server farms are depleting water supplies, forcing more fossil fuel use, consuming vast amounts of resources to create a monster with will perpetually consume more and more, pushing human needs aside.

Still another objection is that Silicon Valley and AI creators are pushing full steam ahead in creating a machine that can further pollute the world with misinformation and so-called “AI-Slop” that pushes people further into schizophrenic world where people are lost and unable to experience the world as it is.

Next, AI is also objectionable because it is a misguided effort to re-create human intelligence in a Frankensteinian effort to replicate ourselves. Such efforts rarely end well as history and our own literature tells us, even if it is possible. This recreation of “human intelligence” is being attempted without any clear definition of what such intelligence is. In other words, Silicon Valley is creating intelligence as it thinks it is, which is problematic because they do not share our human values.

Finally, AI offerings today are objectionable because there is an intense lack of trust when it comes to sharing any more data with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Silicon Valley has not been great stewards of what we have shared with them, using our own data to profit while making us more unsafe. These companies would sacrifice your data-well-being in a minute for profit, and they’ve proven it.

When I advocate caution or even resistance to Ed Tech AI evangelism and AI generally, it is usually due to these objections. Silicon Valley has proven untrustworthy most of all, and I would not do anything to be further complicit in connecting them to the even greater data sources of our students freely sharing information with their products.