Theres some pretty fearsome discussions going on this week between so called sceptics of Gen AI and supporters (although much of the shouting is over the terms of the debate).
Bur it seems pretty incontestable that the big AI technology providers are trying to muscle in on education as a promising market.
In a series of posts on LinkedIn, Ben Williamson from Edinburgh University has looked at the different initiatives by the companies who not surprisingly are giving incentives to sign up with their AI variant. Google he said almost literally buying institutions, with prime ministerial endorsement, to advance its AI interests. Google last week announced the launch the AI Campus, with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer attending “to show his support for our groundbreaking initiative to improve digital skills in the UK in our London home and his constituency.” The pilot They said will offer students access to cutting-edge resources on AI and machine learning, as well as offering mentoring and industry expertise from Google, Google DeepMind, and others.:
Meanwhile not to be outdone Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary AWS - actually its biggest profit centre - announced a $100 million program to provide AI skills to underserved kids.
But as Williamson pointed out that $100m is pretty restricted coming in the form of cloud credits as part of the AWS Education Equity Initiative."
These cloud credits, they say, “essentially act like cash that organizations can use to offset the costs of using AWS's cloud services. Recipients can then take advantage of AWS's comprehensive portfolio of cloud technology and advanced AI services..."
And Microsoft who have already locked in many institutions to their Teams App with all kinds of AI add ons telling education institutions they must upgrade their cloud contracts for purposes of data governance when they use generative AI even more
AI is increasingly seen as a vehicle to expand the cloud business in education, says Williamson, locking education institutions in to hard-to-cancel cloud contracts under the guise of claims about AI efficiencies and improvements in outcomes (unproven as they are). He believes AI in education can't be separated from the cloud biz model.
In an article on his substack newsletter Edward Ongweso Jr points out: "These technologies are complex: their origins, their development, the motivations driving their financing, the political projects they’re connected to, the products they’re integrated."
This shows a need to go beyond present understandings of AI Literacy to understand the activities, intentions and impact of the big technology companies. And for education, it further suggest the need to develop our own applications, based on open source software and independent from a reliance on these companies. Open AI which started with a mission to develop AI to benefit society, now makes no pretense of its profit driven motivation and if that means privatizing education that is not a barrier.
About the image
This image shows a gradual transformation from fish to woman and vice versa - questioning the rigid boundaries of classification and emphasising the fluid, in-between states where entities cannot be neatly boxed into one category or the other. It is particularly reminiscent of early image-generation GAN models, where images could be generated at the midpoint between two concepts in latent space, outputting entertaining visuals while highlighting the complexity, ambiguity, and limits of data labelling.