Tom Rogerson, Headteacher at Cottesmore School in West Sussex, assesses the potential positives and negatives of artificial intelligence’s future influence on education
On 12 May this year, Cottesmore School hosted a free conference on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI). Tickets were snapped up within a day, so the Cottesmore team moved to open it up to a live national and international online audience through a livestream broadcast.
There was certainly a global buzz surrounding the event. Educationalists joined from Singapore, Scotland, Nigeria, New York, Hong Kong, Honduras and from many places in between.
My nephew is at Cottesmore and is a technology wizard. He’s about to head off to Eton College and, in my humble opinion, there’ll be a huge ‘net gain’ when he arrives; he’ll be running the whole school’s technology within six months. He came back from the last weekend exeat in the Christmas term full of excitement about ChatGPT, a new ‘generative’ artificial intelligence application (a ‘large language model’ or ‘LLM’). I listened with mild interest. Then it all kicked off in the Easter term. Elon Musk, an early investor in ChatGPT, wrote an open letter calling for generative artificial intelligence research to be paused for six months while we all catch up. Interest was piqued, and the thirst for AI knowledge had to be quenched.
Credit: Hatice Baran via Pexels
Apparently the Cottesmore ...