After accumulating thousands of pages of school district documents via FOIA requests from around the country, 404’s Jason Koebler found that ChatGPT has “become one of the biggest struggles in American education.” Koebler’s reporting notes that, in the early days of the AI deluge, school districts were courted by “pro-AI consultants” who were known to give presentations that “largely encouraged teachers to use generative AI in their classrooms.” For instance, Koebler writes that the Louisiana Department of Education sent him…
…a presentation it said it consulted called “ChatGPT and AI in Education,” made by Holly Clark, the author of The AI Infused Classroom, Ken Shelton, the author of The Promises and Perils of AI in Education, and Matt Miller, the author of AI for Educators. The presentation includes slides that say AI “is like giving a computer a brain so it can learn and make decisions on its own,” note that “it’s time to rethink ‘plagiarism’ and ‘cheating,’” alongside a graph of how students can use AI to help them write essays, “20 ways to use ChatGPT in the classroom,” and “Warning: Going back to writing essays—only in class—can hurt struggling learners and doesn’t get our kids ready for their future.”
In other words, AI acolytes seemed to anticipate that the technology would effectively ruin essay-writing and test-taking, and wanted to spin it to present the ruination as mere “transformation”—a new way of doing things—instead of a destructive force that would devastate education.
