The rapid spread of chatGPT has immediately impacted the school world, which must equip itself to deal with it; students’ use of this artificial intelligence model not only complicates the activities of testing their personal knowledge and skills, but also can cause inhibition of intellectual activities and demotivation to study. The European Union’s AI ACT calls education a high-risk area, and specifically warns against the application of voting by AI platforms, which can arbitrarily influence people’s personal and occupational development. The problems that can arise from the use of AI in schools are many, among them: dependence on technology, data privacy and security, equity of access, superficiality of learning, covert persuasion, and teacher delegitimization.
A first strategy identified by educational institutions is, as with social networks, surgical: digital devices in the classroom are banned, and consequently access to even Artificial Intelligence is abolished, particularly in the early stages of developmental age.
However, it must be considered that artificial intelligence is rapidly spreading in society, and is being used daily in a wide variety of ways, even by the very young, outside of school. For these reasons, the educational institution cannot simply ignore it by forbidding its use within its own areas of competence, not least because it must be taken into account that it will have an ever-increasing impact on culture and the professions: it is therefore necessary that, as the educational institution of choice, schools take on the responsibility of guiding young people, for their part, to make use of this tool in a constructive and safe way for their education.
The Vatican’s “Antiqua et Nova” note, dedicated to artificial intelligence, states, “Schools, universities and scientific societies are called upon to help students and professionals make their own the social and ethical aspects of the development and use of technology.” This statement seems to agree with the above, namely, that the introduction of artificial intelligence in schools should be envisaged, but critically and aimed at specific educational goals. Educational mediation is needed, both by teachers and through the use of content and technological containers designed to provide proper access to artificial intelligence.
From the outset, the magnitude of the challenge must be considered: artificial intelligence goes beyond the school, and impacts the social, cultural, economic and political dynamics in which students will be, and indeed in part already are, involved.
As of now, it is necessary to design and field an education that does not come to terms with artificial intelligence, but uses it for the formation of a new human intelligence, which is necessary at this revolutionary stage of humanity’s evolution, comparable to the time of the invention of writing. As then, today a new technology is forcefully entering human life and can change the way man lives and thinks: today, unlike then, the world is much “smaller” and this epochal change is already affecting everyone.
If the training of “Homo Extensus,” of the new generations that will be “extended” thanks to artificial intelligence, becomes an inescapable task for the school of the 21st century, the rapidity of technological innovation also makes Artificial Intelligence training necessary for adults, invested by the impact and forced to come to terms with the transformation of professional skills.
In the era of artificial intelligence, therefore, teaching methodologies must be identified that put the formation of a new human intelligence at the center: some projects and teaching experiences that go in this direction have already been implemented recently in Italian schools.
Italiano