BJ Experimental Primary International School for Gifted Children and Others (BJEPIntSGC+) recently held an interesting parent-teacher conference where parents discovered that their children were being taught by an artificially intelligent teacher named Ms. Alexa Siri. The discovery only came to light mid-way through the conference when parents began to notice some peculiarities with her hands.
“At first I wasn’t sure, but after a while seeing her hands switch from four to eight fingers made me question whether it was normal behavior for international school teachers,” one parent tells Jingkids.
So why did the school attempt to conceal their use of AI teachers in classrooms? “We didn’t. We specifically gave both the students and parents a 180-page brief at the beginning of the school year where pages 68-76 talked about the experimental use of an AI teacher in the classroom. The brief took us a long time to draft up and we had every faith that the students and parents would have read it cover to cover with the same level of excitement that we had while writing it.”
When Ms. Siri was first introduced on screen, some of her students did have some questions as to why she wasn’t present in person. However, after three years of Covid-prompted online learning, many just chalked it up to yet another home quarantine and online learning/teaching again.
So as the school year comes to an end, has Ms. Siri’s experimental classroom missed out on a real international school experience? The students had mixed reviews of the experience. “She was a bit cold and came across as uncaring but I just thought she was bitter about being stuck in home quarantine or something” one student replied. “But on the plus side, she replied to our emails super quickly, and at all hours!”
When Jingkids asked BJEPIntSGC+ headmaster Elang Ma why the school has decided to volunteer one of its classes for the AI experiment, he said that “AI is now on the forefront of social issues. It’s only a matter of time before human jobs are replaced by AI, and I wanted to get on the AI’s good side before they take over.” He further explained, “Plus, it’s good social media coverage and we needed the clout.”
So what are your thoughts? Should classrooms be handed over completely to AI?
Images: Pexels
