In a message that highlights the growing fracture between those who embrace artificial intelligence and those who resist it, the vice-president of OpenAi education, Leah Belsky, said that workers who do not learn to use AI will soon find themselves obsolete.
“Luddites do not have their place in a world propelled by AI,” she said in an episode of the Official Podcast of Openai on Friday.
Belsky, who joined Openai in 2024 to direct his education strategy, pleaded for an early and structured exhibition at AI in schools, warning that not to do could leave a whole generation without preparation for the future of work.
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“Any graduate who leaves the institution today must know how to use AI in his daily life,” she said. “And it will come at the time when they apply for jobs as well as when they start their new job.”
His comments follow widespread debates in the academic world, where the use of AI tools like Chatgpt has often been qualified as cheating. But Belsky said such a framing is missing the point. Rather than banning AI, she argued, educational institutions should teach students to use it in a responsible manner-not as a “machine to respond”, but as a catalyst for deeper learning.
“AI is finally a tool,” said Belsky, comparing him to calculators once feared by mathematics teachers. “What matters most in an education space is the way this tool is used. If students use AI as a reply machine, they will not learn. And so part of our trip here is to help students and educators use AI to extend critical thinking and extend creativity. ”
To encourage this type of learning, Openai recently introduced a new feature called study mode in Chatgpt. The functionality provides students with “guidelines that calibrate the answers to their level of objective and competence”, to help them strengthen a more in -depth understanding, rather than regurgitate the responses generated by the AI. This is part of the broader thrust of the company to integrate support for learning structured directly into AI interfaces.
A central competence that Belsky thinks that each student must acquire is coding, if only at a basic level. She underlined the “atmosphere coding”, a popular method where people use natural language to encourage AI to write code. Although useful, it is not infallible; Since the code generated by AI can be riddled with errors, users always need technical knowledge or access to someone who can check their accuracy. Nevertheless, Belsky said that such tools will eventually facilitate that each student does not only use AI, but also to build with it.
“Now, with an ambient coding and now that there are all kinds of tools that facilitate coding,” she said, “I think we are going to arrive at a place where each student should not only learn to use AI in general, but they should learn to use AI to create images, to create applications, to write code.”
But some educators remain suspicious – not to cheat, but from what they call the erosion of “productive struggle”. This idea refers to the challenge that learners face by trying to understand new material, an experience that many consider crucial to develop real skills. The concern is that AI, by offering instant answers, could deprive students of the difficult but rewarding process by effort.
Openai and others respond to this criticism. The study mode and other emerging tools aim to reintroduce intellectual “friction” to strategic points during the interaction of a student with AI. Belsky said this approach could preserve cognitive work essential for long -term learning.
Technological companies beyond Openai also try to rethink the way students are involved with AI. Kira Learning – A startup chaired by the founder of Google Brain Andrew NG – has developed AI tools for the class since 2021. This year, he launched a range of agents to help non -expert teachers to introduce IT in their lessons. Kira CEO Andre Pasinetti told Business Insider that the objective was to design AI systems that encourage students to think, iterate and learn errors, rather than just copying responses.
Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, said that universities must reassess their entire education approach.
“There are a lot of whips about” How can we prevent people from cheating “and not to look” what should we teach and test? “”, He said in a recent podcast interview with Azeem Azhar. “The whole system is configured to encourage to obtain good grades. And it is exactly the competence that will be obsolete. ”
The consensus among the leaders of technology, as the use of AI develops in classrooms and conference rooms, seems to be that the division is no longer between users and non-users, but between those who use AI well and those who do not.
