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UK prime minister Keir Starmer doubled down on his promise to unleash dubious \u201cAI tutors\u201d on nearly half a million children in need.<\/p>\n
Starmer\u2019s avowal came while speaking at London Tech Week on Monday. His speech<\/a> was laden with everything AI. He hailed the creation of a new AI data center, demanded tech companies to install surveillance software on citizens\u2019 phones to prevent minors from sending and receiving nudes<\/a>, boasted that 1.7 million workers had been \u201cupskilled\u201d with government provided AI training, and announced a new AI jobs tool to help the jobless find work and create CVs, the irony of which we will not even attempt to articulate.<\/p>\n That brings us to Starmer\u2019s education gambit. The government will roll out AI tutors to 450,000 children on free school meals, he proclaimed, in a bid \u201cto close the attainment gap.\u201d That\u2019s the gap in the educational success between students from different social backgrounds.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the logic behind this initiative, first announced in January, is on shaky ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n Noting that disadvantaged children pass standardized English and math exams at half the rate their peers do, the original announcement<\/a> cites evidence showing that one-to-one tutoring can accelerate a child\u2019s learning by around five months, before observing that access to tutoring is \u201cdeeply unequal.\u201d Here, AI tutors can step in and \u201cprovide extra help\u201d to disadvantaged students when they \u201cneed more practice to master their lessons\u201d and \u201chelp them catch up with their peers.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem, of course, is that there\u2019s a significant body of research suggesting that AIs are the opposite effective learning tools, with studies showing that using AI reduced brain activity during cognitive tasks<\/a>, impaired critical thinking skills<\/a>, and was associated with memory loss<\/a>.<\/p>\n Beyond that, it\u2019s preposterous to think that handing out access to an AI chatbot is all that\u2019s needed to reverse a kid\u2019s academic fortunes. If anything, it only underscores just how little their government thinks of them. Sorry, you 450,000 little tax payer burdens with your free lunches: here\u2019s a crummy, hallucinating chatbot, so can we all agree that we did our best to help you get into Oxford?<\/p>\n Many bemoaned Starmer\u2019s initiative.<\/p>\n \u201cInflicting AI tutors on the poorest in society, when their effects are so little understood, is the height of irresponsibility,\u201d tweeted<\/a> Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies that generative AI tools are trained on fairly obtained data. \u201cThis government has been entirely captured by the tech industry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAI for the poor, actual human teachers for the rich,\u201d another user wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n The UK wouldn\u2019t be the first nation to head down this route. Last December, Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0xAI\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0what it called the \u201cworld\u2019s first nationwide AI-powered education program\u201d to deploy its notoriously unbalanced chatbot Grok to more than 5,000 public schools, reaching some two million children.<\/p>\n