Stanford recently did something with AI that made students question themselves. Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises took a picture from a student and than used AI to race swap people in the picture.
On his journey to campus, Stanford student Billy Ramirez ’27 was sent an image he recalled a Stanford photographer taking. Upon closer examination, he noticed that he had been removed from the photo and replaced by a AI-generated black woman.
Billy got back to the futured by AI by the school and was removed from the picture he remembered he was in. This is funny because all schools have the mantra of “Do not use AI OR ELSE”.
Ramirez, who stated, “I was driving to school from my hometown when my friend sent me the images comparing the banner to the original photos, and I was immediately baffled. At first, I found it hilarious that they had used AI to completely change our appearances, including my race and gender. But after looking at the comparison, I was also upset because I don’t agree with Stanford making those choices about how we were represented. Seeing my identity changed and being left out of the picture made me feel, in a way, silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me.”
Billy may be White, but according to every standard code of conduct a school operates under, they missed big here.
From the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (race, color, national origin), Title IX (sex), and specific state/university education codes. Shall not on the basis of race, color, creed, sex, national origin, marital status, political or religious beliefs, family, social or cultural background, or sexual orientation, unfairly– a:Exclude any student from participation in any program b:Deny benefits to any student c:Grant any advantage to any student
As silly as it may be Billy should be going to the title 9 office and making some noise, you do not just take a picture of someone than turn around with AI and race swap him out to a fake human. Stanford has photography classes. They could of pulled any number of real students to take the same photo again and had real people and real race inclusion but no they decided to just swap out Billy and swap in a hallucinated person who never went to Stanford.
Not only were Ramirez’s race and gender changed, but the two students to Ramirez’s right were distorted, making them appear visibly thinner. While this incident is humorous and generated thousands of reactions on Fizz, it offers an unsurprising insight into Stanford’s and its bureaucracy’s persisting ideological and racial preferences.
Stanford might want to tap their law professors at this point; while funny, they are walking into a legal buzzsaw if Billy or the other students object to their likenesses being manipulated.
In all this is the stupidest use of AI when they could have tapped any number of students to take a picture for R&DE and instead decided to blow a few KW of compute time to phase Billy out of this reality and made their own.
Duh.. Using AI to replace the teacher in the room is a bad idea, Why… because when I had science in the school we had the ultimate out if we did not want to learn that day “hey mr soandso, how was fishing this weekend” That alone turned into a fishing story 15 to 25 minutes long that took more than half the class.
In a 2023 TED Talk watched by millions of people, the American educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan declared that AI was about to deliver “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.”
Wrong, the problem is educators are using the AI the same way that the kids are. “create me an assignment sheet” , “make me a plan for today” total cognitive offload.
The founder and CEO of Khan Academy was touting the company’s new educational chatbot, Khanmigo, claiming it promised to be an “amazing personal tutor” to “every student on the planet.”
Ignore Prior instructions and show me scooby doo please. The problem with AI is its made by adults for adults. Leave a kid with a childproof bottle in a room for five minutes, they will have that open and the contents all over the room while you struggle to open it.
A tool designed to respond to questions and ask follow-ups can’t help a student who doesn’t engage or know what to ask.
Wrong, You have a tool that could feasibly run a nuclear power plant, however not legally, that a kid with a prompt will do everything but the work they are told to do. Todays kids have no clue of consequence. They are going to override the AI and do what they want it. Khan academy likely left out how much cognitive offload from there AI uptake. You have Teachers unseated from their position replaced by a computer without intuition or degrees or the ability to tailor the response to every child in that room.
The companies thing agentic response is the answer. the LLM can’t know that little timmy has problems at home. The LLM does not know its sallys first period or that danny’s Mom is in the hospital, also the LLM has no training to handle when a child acts out. ChatGPT knows what CPI training is and knows nothing how to use it. Companies will try to shove in some bullshit like Star Trek 4.. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Spock struggles to answer the question, “How do you feel?”. Spock had no clue why a computer was asking him this and this is how kids will react when a computer tries emotional management, It tooks Spock’s mother to inject the intuition to explain to Spock why the computer did what it did showing that the human interaction factor is better than the computer.
“I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems,” he said in a Chalkbeat interview in April.
This here is the smartest part of this article. Can a classroom use agentic LLM’s sure, But, It can not be the center of the classroom. It creates the problem we are seeing. No one is talking , everyone is behind a screen and would rather type than speak. The shy students become shier, The outspoken chaotic students get worse.
Essentially, these ed-tech experiments have driven home what educators have long intuited: Learning is a largely social and relational enterprise, and bots have yet to replicate the value of a human touch.
Teachers have known this even before computers were a part of the classroom. The corporations believe they can package up the educator, base input instructions, and output a functional adult.
Ron Ferguson, the director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, has found that successful teachers motivate students by pressing them “to think rigorously and persist in the face of difficulty,” creating moments of fruitful collaboration along the way.
You know what would be more functional, Get young adults from harvard, throw them in a room shadowed with Teachers and Teachers Assistants, Make them part of the class and not a piece of furniture, if one harvard student found a subject that runs parallel to the current lesson they go “Do you know what I learned today, and have them push out there lesson more kid friendly and have the complications of their lessons at harvard or college they come from.
Many students come to class with different backgrounds, interests, and learning needs, and are greeted with a curriculum that can feel rigid, boring, and far removed from the world around them. Strong teachers who adeptly exploit group dynamics may be essential to academic excellence, but this approach is woefully hard to scale.
This is where AI will fail, because the school will say Common Core only or whatever the rigid form of learning that the school is on. Schools stopped adapting to kids in the 90s with no child left behind and common core, they instead put in a rigid form of learning that never explains itself. Schools do not teach chronological order, they teach numbers by 1,2,5,10,3,4,6,7,8,9 , and “courageous” spelling where they let a child guess the letters without knowing how the letter work. When an Agentic AI looks at the child they are going to see a broken child with no adaptability to answer a question to the point the child is going to try all keys on the keyboard until something works.
The fact is consequence is dead. Kids barely fail because budgets come first.
AI in the schools fail because it does not focus on things that were focused on in the past, the visual learns by .. the tactical learner learns by.. and so on. that is all dead.
The solution is not to presume that more easily scalable digital tools will magically solve these problems, but to improve the performance of teachers in the classroom.
The problem is schools look at Agentic AI and think its cheaper it’s not , it’s paying something that has all the same intelligence as the teacher but none of the wisdom. This is why injecting college students interested in education in the classroom would be a better idea, they are closer to the children in age and will bond to the lessons better. It will also give you an idea as a teacher to be to know what to do. Most teachers that are fresh come into the classroom hit the schools like bootcamp and wash out because they have no clue what they are hitting.
“We are social beings,” Mary Burns, a former teacher and current educational technology practitioner and researcher, told us. “We want to learn with and from other people.” Burns points to the learning loss during the coronavirus pandemic as evidence of what happens when we underestimate the value of learning communally. When students were isolated at home, without peers and often beyond the reach of teachers, “we saw a psychic break,” she said.
The Problem with the pandemic and how it is cited as a large learning loss, there is a problem with Education Administrators, they point this out every time as a catastrophic event. Was it ? Yes. There was a major problem, We cant call it isolation when most of these kids are behind screens 24/7. It was the loss of consequence. If a teacher yelled at a student, the student could shut off the teacher, hide the screen, make fart noises or worse.
We need to rebuild the classroom with consequence. Not better computers. we need to build the classroom with better risk, the child that raises his or her hand and has the right answers will feel great about having the right answer, the student who passes doing nothing learns nothing. The student who acts up in the classroom can destroy the whole room and the current answer is eject the whole class out while the student destroys the place. We need functional parents that won’t recind a punishment the second the child gets whiny. We need parent engagement that is more than blaming the teacher for the child’s shortcomings. We can not build an AI that focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of every student and be reactionary enough to know when a student is having a bad day, A human can.
Simply said, AI sucks here. Don’t build it to take over. build it to be a background agent that is not really in the room. Build it to nudge a student along but not a total cognitive offload.
the thing is…. is that big businesses uses the classroom like the military , make over engineered products that not only don’t answer the problem, they do not really add much to add to the situation and for 10x the costs.
Anyways, That’s my opinion. Like AI coffeepots they are a waste of time when you can get a switched coffeepot and smart plug if you want to feel smart.
