AI use will follow the school’s (generic) AI policy. Some art and design specific guidelines and expectations might be helpful.
Reflection points
- What formal and official regulations, guidance and AI policies exist which will inform schools, teachers and students use of AI?
- What are teachers professional obligations with regard to AI?
- Is the teaching of art different to other subjects with regard to AI?
- How?
- Is there a need for AI policy guidelines at departmental level?
‘…recent advances in technology mean that we can now use tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard to produce AI-generated content. This creates opportunities and challenges for the education sector’
‘A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation.’
Department for Science Technology and Innovation. Updated July 2023
The Five Principles
This government white paper represents the broad approach to AI. It acknowledges that AI will unleash great innovation and drive productivity and it recognises the speed at which these technologies are evolving. The paper describes how the government will avoid rushing to legislate too early and that there is a need to take time to properly understand new and emerging risks through proportionate monitoring and a pragmatic approach. Alongside this pragmatism is a recognition of the need to build public trust through proportionate regulation.
The paper proposes five principles to guide and inform the responsible development and use of AI in all sectors of the economy. These principles will filter down to school level and will likely inform a school’s AI policy.
- Safety, security and robustness
- Appropriate transparency and explainability
- Fairness
- Accountability and governance
- Contestability and redress.
Opportunities and Challenges
‘Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education.’
Department for education, training and skills. Updated October 2023
This Department for education training and skills paper takes its cue from government’s white paper (above). It is essentially descriptive and acknowledges the broad range of what AI technologies encompass (audio, code, images, text, simulations, videos), and that AI is already embedded in everyday life. The paper acknowledges that this creates opportunities and challenges for the education sector.
Opportunities: This paper states that generative AI tools are good at:
- Analysing, structuring, and writing text
- Turning prompts into audio, video and images
- Reducing workload across the education sector
- Freeing up teachers’ time allowing them to focus on teaching.
Challenges: It recognises that generative AI outputs could be:
- Inaccurate
- Inappropriate
- Biased
- Taken out of context and without permission
- Out of date or unreliable.
The paper explains that although AI can be convenient it cannot replace human judgement and deep subject knowledge. In short it states that the responsibility for any content generated through AI remains the responsibility of the user to verify, and edit prior to using, or presenting it. It suggests that Schools and colleges may wish to review homework policies and other types of unsupervised study to account for the availability of generative AI.
The paper goes on to suggest that school AI policies should take account of specific issues. These may in part be traced back to the earlier white paper ‘A pro-innovation approach to AI’.
School AI Policy
The issues for school policies to address include the following:
- ensuring any data entered should not be identifiable
- ensuring that personal and special category data should be protected in accordance with data protection legislation
- preventing intellectual property including pupil’s work, to be use to train generative AI models without appropriate consent or exemption to copyright
- reviewing and strengthening their cyber security as generative AI could increase the sophistication and credibility of attacks
- ensuring that children are not accessing, or creating, harmful or inappropriate content online, including through generative AI by:
- protecting students online, limiting students exposure to risks from the schools IT system.
- making sure they have appropriate systems in place
- being open and transparent and ensuring students understand that their personal data is being processed by AI tools
- providing guidance on what counts as AI misuse
- establishing requirements for teachers to help prevent and detect malpractice.
In addition to identifying issues of concern, paradoxically, the paper explores the need to prepare students to develop the right skills, and to make the best use of generative AI safely and appropriately. This will involve teaching students about AI, it’s benefits as well as its potential for harm.
Balance
Art and design teachers will need to recognise and understand the implications of these statements which will inform the school AI policies. They will need to balance the potential dissonance between the safeguarding obligations placed on school networks, and the expectation that schools should also prepare students to develop the right skills to make the best use of AI safely and appropriately.
These are whole school issues but art and design teachers will wish to contribute to the debate. They will need to negotiate the relationship between whole school generic issues and subject specific opportunities to enhance creativity and subject knowledge using new technologies.
Resources
Click here to download the JCQ appendix for students which describes how AI might be used for research.
Click here to download an open source school policy template by the ‘Computing at School’
Click here to download the Russell Group paper ‘Principles on the use of generative AI tools in education.
further reading