Students were invited to attend a presentation on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and learning by Eric Hudson, an educational consultant who has collaborated with Andover teachers in the development of class curriculum and Workshop 10 and Workshop 12 for several years. The talk is the first in a yearlong series of presentations hosted by the Tang Institute discussing the growing role of generative AI in schools and the learning process.
Andrew Housiaux, Instructor and Chair in Religion and Philosophy and the Currie Family Director of the Tang Institute, noted the motivation behind the topic for the Tang Institution series this year. Housiaux highlighted AI’s relevancy and challenge to the traditional learning process as reasons why it is important to be educated about it.
“Generative AI raises a range of fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of a Phillips Academy education, and of schooling and education more generally. It’s a rich and complex topic that is of interest to students and adults alike. Generative AI is also evolving and changing quite rapidly: it’s not a problem that can be solved as much as it is an ongoing, dynamic reality that will have to be managed with wisdom and care,” wrote Housiaux in an email to The Phillipian.
Although AI is often portrayed as a mechanism for cheating, Hudson expounded on different ideas, highlighting the different scales of assistance that AI can provide to students. Kashvi Ramani ’24, one of several students who attended the talk, enjoyed the opportunity to develop new perspectives on the potential of AI.
“I knew about AI in a very basic sense, but I did want to learn a lot more about it coming from an actual speaker, because it is such a big part of our nation today. The speaker was talking specifically about not banning AI in every classroom and calling it cheating, rather calling it assistance, and encouraging teachers to be more open-minded about students using AI. They told us a lot more about AI software that can be used for many different things. I will definitely be using some of them,” said Ramani.
While many students agreed that the school’s ban of all AI usage in assignments was a reasonable first step, they felt that Andover should reevaluate its policy on AI. Chris Wong ’24 listed both AI’s ubiquitousness and its potential to augment the learning process as reasons to change the policy.
“I’d like to see the school take a more considerate approach in terms of recognizing the inevitable usage of these tools. I think presentations like the one on Friday are good in terms of informing the community as a whole [about] the existential questions that AI brings to learning, like how can we recenter ourselves in the process of learning, and how can we best use and align our learning with these new tools that can catapult us in this journey. Instead of seeing AI as a roadblock, I’d like to see the school make some new revisions as administrators understand this new technology more,” said Wong.
One of the centric themes in the discussion was the potential for AI to exacerbate current societal biases. However, Hudson also mentioned the possibility of using AI as an equalizer, pointing to an application called “LetterWise,” which streamlines writing college recommendations. Georgie Harpole ’25 noted how this example influenced her perspective on AI.
“One thing that people want to consider when we have these conversations is that a lot of kids in really large schools or schools that are perhaps not as well funded as Andover will not have access to personalized college counseling, if at all. The kids that go to these schools oftentimes will not get great college recommendations, not because they’re not comparable, not because they aren’t high achieving, but because their teachers and college advisors have no time to write for them or do not personally know them. So when I heard that LetterWise was writing college recs, I thought that that’s actually great,” said Harpole.
Wong argued that although AI can massively accelerate the learning process, it also does not come without its dangers. Given AI’s power, Wong noted, we need to be very careful and mindful about how and why we use it.
“In the face of this technology, it seems like it solves all these problems, because with the right prompting it can give you a better output than what you can do in the collective 12 years of your education, and that’s a really easy trap to fall into. But what I’ve realized for myself is that learning is not just for the output, but there is something that’s deeply satisfying for yourself in that learning process. The cultivation of something that you can own completely, of worldviews, of the ways in which we interact with the world. That’s irreplaceable,” said Wong.
