By Dain Olsen
Understanding AI's Impact
AI's ‘explosive’ development is a radial, 360-degree expansion across all domains and dimensions of society. It's not just a tool we can choose to use or put away, but a systemic, technological force with unpredictable organic characteristics. Like social media, and any other technological leap, AI will likely have both positive and negative effects on society, as well as unintended consequences. Nevertheless, AI is here to stay, so we will need to learn to work with and manage it as it progresses and proliferates.
AI has shown impressive and breakthrough results in various applications across societal sectors, such as accelerating scientific discoveries, advancing industrial efficiencies, and supporting greatly increased individual productivity and capabilities. Yet, it will also eliminate major sectors of employment, can exacerbate criminal activity, and is demonstrated to be unreliable and prone to errors. Artistically, AI can support more students to produce more sophisticated products, for example in verbal prompts to create entire video games. It also can enhance creativity and invention by generating compelling variations that humans might not have considered. On the other hand, its autonomous creative expression tends to be conventional, slick and fairly ‘soulless’.
Theoretical improvements to AI in Generalized Intelligence and Superintelligence are arguably far off or even infeasible. There is also the possibility that AI will fail to fulfill the hype that usually accompanies new technological breakthroughs.
AI in Education
In education, AI could provide personalized tutoring along with illustrative multimedia graphics, support teachers in lesson preparation and assessment, and help manage bureaucratic processes. However, the overuse of AI might also lead to decreased student motivation and a tendency to skip difficult cognitive processes and critical thinking. In fact, some edtech companies are suggesting that it replace arts and media arts instruction. Furthermore, it raises the question of whether we will use it in innovative new ways to truly advance education, and limit it to improving traditional methods.
Major Concerns
Despite its profound benefits, AI also raises these serious reservations:
It's an experimental technology with unpredictable consequences
There's a risk of becoming completely dependent on AI, and even an imperative in every aspect of society,
AI may further amplify societal disparities and inequalities
AI is limited by our own mindsets and habits
It is an energy hog, which is already challenging our grids and our CO2 reduction goals
It is unclear whether governmental regulations and educational policies will be fully effective and ahead of the curve in monitoring, preventing and solving AI’s problems
A Media Arts Education (MAE) Perspective
MAE presents a primary means to improve and transform education, particularly in combination with AI, which can ultimately address these larger negatives. Essentially, MAE supports the core content and STEM concepts to become multimodally plastic, flexible, and versatile, so that they come alive with artistic and design capacities. Thus students, through engaging collaborative projects, can apply, represent and simulate the abstract content through combinations of image, sound, story, graphics, interactive and virtual forms (e.g. 3D animated, playful models of physics, mathematics, cell division, weather, etc.; science or history videos; video games, immersive XR environments, etc). Students would manipulate, adjust, and play with these multimedia models until they fully and tangibly understand those concepts, and then transfer them to varied applications and situations. This results in deeper, more resilient learning, aligned with current learning science and cognitive research.
Thus, students gain flexible, diverse inquiry pathways for actively applying, demonstrating, and sharing their academic proficiency, beyond standardized tests. Also, students are in the position of directing their own learning, based on their own interests and needs. No other subject area has the capacity to form such holistic, transdisciplinary, culturally meaningful and community connected forms of creative inquiry and productive interaction. This is the perfect embodied, social, holistic complement to AI’s relatively narrow, intellectual capacities for instructional support.
Consider one example of this MAE-based approach: Students produce a transmedia mental health campaign, which supports all students to produce, share and interact in socially beneficial and empowering ways. Students produce diverse events, broadcasts, and interactions for varied outputs and audiences. They apply statistical analysis to measure algorithmic processes and their impacts on the school and community. All students gain critical media literacies for verifying, analyzing and evaluating multimedia information and processes, and collaboratively nurturing a civil digital society.
Media Arts + AI = Holistic Educational Transformation
We need to prepare youth for a rapidly changing world, supporting them to ensure that AI is designed and utilized effectively and strategically to address a convergence of global challenges, including AI itself. AI’s support for individualized skills mastery and teacher efficiency means that schools can begin to shift to higher-orders of instructional implementation, such as MAE can offer, which foster student-centered initiative, ownership and motivation. It is important to appreciate that the human, embodied mind, and our collective minds, are tremendously more powerful and potentiated than AI is, and perhaps ever will be. An advanced educational system can begin to fulfill that potential, ultimately benefiting society in extraordinary ways.
Factory Model: regimented, assembly-line, one-size-fits-all, top-down, cognitively narrow, no-context
MAE Model: flexible, adaptive, inclusive, student-centered, cognitively expansive, enriched contexts
In conclusion, this results in a flexible and interconnective educational system which actuates students’ personal inquiry process into boundless possibilities, and infuses the system as a whole with a collective drive towards continual adaptive improvement and learning about learning. It allows students to actually practice management of their digital society, including AI and other literacies (e.g. media, digital) towards ethical, equitable and holistically grounded objectives. This transformed model provides the means by which our society learns to manage AI and address our converging global challenges.
