近年来，特别是疫情发生以来，技术大举进军教育领域。ChatGPT 和其他生成式人工智能技术的出现将如何成为转折点？
2019新冠肺炎大流行期间，人们发现可以通过互联网提供教育。近来，大语言模型的出现极大地影响了公众对于人工智能的认识，2022年底ChatGPT推出以来，已然经历了一场革命。
我们知道，在导师指导下学习比传统课堂学习的效果要高出两三倍。大约60年来，人们一直在研究人工智能辅导系统，但由于两个问题，人工智能系统始终无法实现与人类导师同等的学习效果。
一个问题是，人工智能系统无法与学生对话，回答不了问题，也无法与学生建立关系。另一个问题是，人工智能辅导系统不理解所教授的内容，这些系统可以演示化学内容，但它们不懂化学，这就意味着即便系统能够与学生对话，也无法正确回答问题。这种情况直到近年才有所改观。
随着大语言模型的出现，这两个问题在一定程度上得到了解决。人们可以用多种语言进行连贯的人机对话。在回答与内容有关的问题时，这些系统也表现得相当靠谱。的确仍存在不足之处，有待改进，但我认为经过适当的努力，人工智能辅导系统至少可以支持从小学到高中的大多数科目的学习。
“要让人工智能辅导系统了解教学的作用，
是一大难题”
目前，人们在一定程度上已经体验到了这样一种生活方式——随心所欲地利用人工智能来解决任何问题。但这可能会让人产生误解，其实我们面对的并不是真正意义上的通用智能。人工智能系统可以娴熟地使用语言，由此产生了貌似智能的表象，但人工智能生成的内容并非总是有意义的。
今年是一个转折点，将涌现出大量新技术和改进技术，但我们还有许多工作要做。通用人工智能（AGI）的出现将让所有这些技术都黯然失色，这种人工智能系统的适用范围至少与人类能够胜任的工作范围相当。我认为，到这个十年结束时，我们能够为全世界所有儿童提供教育。
© Boris Séméniako为联合国教科文组织《信使》创作
教师的工作会发生变化，但人们仍然需要教师。当前的挑战之一是让人工智能辅导系统了解教学的特性：人工智能的任务不是保持一贯正确，也不是提供所有的答案，而是必须帮助学生自己找出答案。有人演示过用培养教师的方法来训练通用语言模型，让人印象深刻。
每名学生与人工智能系统的互动情况如何？学生是否得到了所需的帮助？他们有哪些不明白的地方？应该采用哪种合理的学习方法？要了解这些，都需要人类的介入。学生还必须学会在社会环境中团结协作并发挥作用，他们为此仍需要成人的指导。
可以采用这样的模式：一名教师带8至10名学生，用大量时间单独辅导，教师有点像是知识向导。这样一来，学生们实际面对的教师更多了，而非减少了。
在传统教育系统中，各年级都有成绩不佳的学生。有些孩子能力超群，学校会让他们感到枯燥无聊；另一些孩子在课上听不懂，很快就丧失了学习的动力。可怕的是，有些孩子顺利完成了学校教育，但依然是文盲。这显然是由于我们的教育系统没有关注每名学生的具体表现。
此外，教育系统没有真正考虑到学习方式的多样性，出色的人工智能教学系统可以快速适应每名学习者的具体需求，但我们还没有做到这一点。
这场大流行让人们看到世界上存在一道数字鸿沟，最新一代技术会重蹈覆辙吗？
对于经济发达的国家和尚未建立真正教育体系的国家，二者的情况肯定截然不同。我认为这项技术将在目前无力负担中小学教育系统的国家产生最显著的影响。显然，仍有部分儿童无法使用手机或互联网。
但我认为，随着全球每月都有数以千万计的新用户接入互联网，这种情况很快就会改变。与同教师视频通话相比，人工智能辅导模型所需的带宽要小得多。
针对人工智能制定了许多监管举措。在政策领域，2023年3月发表了一封由多名技术专家联名签署的公开信，呼吁所有人工智能实验室暂停训练比GPT-4更强大的人工智能系统，并引发了政策反应。
联合国教科文组织立即行动起来，呼吁成员国采取保障措施，确保人工智能的开发符合伦理原则。中国政府、美国政府、欧洲联盟和多家科技公司都已意识到，需要采取行动了。
“在教育领域，
评价被许多人视为高风险领域，因而备受关注。”
随着人工智能的发展，数据保护和隐私问题将越发严重。制定严格的隐私规则非常必要。相关数据可以向教师开放，如出现任何纪律问题，也可向管理人员开放。
另一个问题是，我们不知道该如何防范人工智能系统与未成年儿童进行不适宜的对话。关于人工智能与人类讨论的话题，必须有严格的限制。不过，像ChatGPT这样的系统在拥有数万亿参数的黑盒中运行，我们并不真正了解其运作原理。许多人都在尝试解开这个谜题，但在我看来，这或许是不可能的。
我认为监管工作可以推动公司开发更好的技术。监管机构绝不能接受“我们不知道该怎么做”这样的借口。假如核电站运营商表示，不知道该如何防止核电站爆炸，其监管机构绝不会说，“好吧，没关系”，而是会勒令核电站在问题得到解决之前不得使用相关系统。
不过从长远来看，我依然乐观地认为，我们可以开发出我们切实理解并且能够掌控的技术。
Stuart J. Russell: "Teachers’ work may change but we will always need them"
Capable not only of providing content but also of interacting with students, generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be an excellent aid to teachers, provided their development is controlled and supervised, explains Stuart J.
Russell, professor of computer science at the University of Berkeley (United States) and co-author with Peter Norvig of the reference book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
Technology has truly made its way into the education sector in recent years, especially since the pandemic. In what way is the arrival of ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies a turning point?
During COVID-19 we found out that it’s possible to deliver education via the internet. More recently, large language models have had a huge impact on the public perception of AI – there has been a revolution since ChatGPT was launched in late 2022.
We know that learning with a human tutor can be two to three times more effective than traditional classroom learning. We have worked on AI tutoring systems for about 60 years, but until recently two problems prevented those systems from being as effective as a human tutor. Firstly, they cannot – or could not – have a conversation with the student, answer questions or develop a relationship. Another problem is that AI tutoring systems do not understand the content they teach. They might present content about chemistry, but they don't understand chemistry, which means that even if they were able to have a conversation with the student, they couldn't answer questions properly.
With the advent of large language models, both of those things have now changed to some extent. You can have a coherent conversation in quite a few languages. The systems are also rather reliable when it comes to answering questions on content. There are still weaknesses that need to be addressed, but I believe that with a reasonable amount of effort, we should be able to deliver a tutor for most subjects, at least through the end of high school.
To some extent people now have got a flavour of what it would be like to live in a world where you could just tap into an arbitrary amount of intelligence to solve any problem. However, it's a little misleading because it isn't really general intelligence we’re dealing with. There's a lot of appearance of intelligence coming from the fact that the systems use a very fluent language – but what they produce doesn’t always make sense.
This year is a turning point. There will be a huge rolling out of technology and variants of it, but we still have much more work to do. And all this pales in comparison to what will happen when artificial general intelligence (AGI) – intelligent systems whose breadth of applicability is at least comparable to the range of tasks that humans can address – becomes available. I believe that we will be able to deliver education for every child in the world by the end of the decade.
“Getting AI tutoring systems to understand the pedagogical role is one of the major challenges “
What will become of teachers in the face of these new developments?
Although their job will change, teachers will still be needed. One of the current challenges is to get the AI tutoring systems to understand the specific nature of the pedagogical role: rather than always being right or having all the answers, they must help the students find the answers themselves. There are already some quite impressive demonstrations of how generic language models can be trained with examples of how to be a teacher.
Humans will still be needed to figure out how each pupil interacts with the system. Are they getting what they need? What are they failing to understand? What would be a good path for them to follow? Students must also learn to work together and to function in a social environment, for which they need adult guides. The model could be that a teacher works with eight to ten students and spends a lot of time with them individually, a bit like an intellectual guide. In this case we might actually end up with more teachers, not less.
In the traditional education system there's underachievement at all levels. There are kids who are bored because they're much more capable. And then there are kids who don't follow and who quickly lose motivation. It's terrible that we still have children who make it all the way through the school system and remain illiterate. This is clearly a problem of the system not caring about how the individual student is doing. In addition, our educational system does not really take into account the variety of learning styles – a good AI teaching system should be able to adapt very quickly to the individual learner. However, we’re not there yet.
The pandemic also revealed a digital divide in the world. Why should it be any different with these latest-generation technologies?
The situation is certainly very different for economically advanced countries and countries that don’t have a real education system in place. I think that this technology will have the biggest impact in countries that currently can't afford to have a primary and secondary education system at all. Obviously, there are still children who don’t have access to phones or the internet. But I believe that this is changing relatively rapidly as tens of millions a month are gaining internet access globally. AI tutoring models also require much less bandwidth than a video call with a teacher.
“To ensure worldwide reach, we would probably need either a public sector or a private sector process incentivized and facilitated by government”
The bottleneck will likely be the effort required to create customized content and tutors for each culture and language. Developing these technologies is expensive. Historically education hasn't been viewed as a particularly desirable area for the tech industry. To ensure worldwide reach, we would probably need either a public sector or a private sector process that is incentivized and facilitated by governments. Maybe a part of foreign aid could be used to create effective education systems. It would be a tragedy if this failed to happen because of greed on the part of corporations or mistrust on the part of governments – or for any other reason.
The development of these new applications needs to be regulated, as many technology players acknowledge. Do you see this regulation of generative AI taking shape?
Many regulation initiatives are being developed around AI. In the policy world, the open letter [calling for all AI labs to pause the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 signed by tech experts and published in March 2023] seemed to precipitate the policy response. UNESCO reacted right away, calling on its member states to adopt safeguards and ensure that AI is developed in accordance with ethical principles. Among others, the Chinese government, the American government, the European Union, and tech companies woke up to the need to do something.
“In the area of education, evaluation is of particular concern, considered by many as a high-risk area”
Data protection and privacy is going to become a more serious issue with AI. There should be strict rules about privacy. The data could be open to the teacher and possibly to administrators in case of any disciplinary issues or such.
Another issue is that we don't know how to prevent the AI systems from having inappropriate conversations with underage children. There must be strict limitations on the topics AI can discuss with humans. However, systems like ChatGPT operate in a black box with a trillion parameters and we don't really know how it works. Lots of people are trying to figure this out; my view is that it may not be possible.
I think regulation will force the development of better technology. Regulators must not accept as an excuse that “we don't know how to do that”. If you were a nuclear regulator and the nuclear power plant operator said that they didn't know how to stop it from exploding, you wouldn't say, “Ok, that's fine”. Instead, you would tell them that they cannot use the system until the problem is solved. Nevertheless, in the long run, I’m optimistic that we'll be able to develop technology that we do understand and can control.
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