1. AI and children

I think what I recently read about AI in education has really given me a more concrete perspective of how to view AI as a whole. Of course, it is pretentious for anyone to claim that they are fully in control of themselves and how they use AI, but for me personally, I feel that children in primary or even secondary schools should not be using AI at all. Recently, in Singapore, many educational policies are pushing for the introduction and integration of AI in classrooms from primary school onwards.

At this point, I just want to ask: is this doing too much? Even though, yes, we are a ‘Smart nation’, and AI has the potential to empower all of us in our learning, if used correctly. But in my opinion, I think we should ask ourselves if this is too much for children to take in. Consider the fact that the purpose of school was primarily to build critical thinking skills and make connections with one another. Now, we are asking the AI to ‘supplement’ the critical thinking, and children spend a non-negligible amount of time typing away to their best friends ChatGPT or Claude at school. At such a young age, I believe children have yet to learn enough critical thinking skills to assess which tasks require the addition of such AI tools, and which should actually be done on their own to hone their judgement and nurture their critical thinking abilities. If you were to ask yourself as a young child, I’m sure we would have all taken the easier way out - and scarily, the children of this generation indeed have the option of taking an elevator uphill, instead of climbing like we did, only less than half a decade ago.

Although it is not necessarily true that adults, or older individuals in general, would be able to judge appropriate use of AI all of the time (as I’m sure many videos on social media have demonstrated to us recently), I would posit that they would be much better at it than primary or secondary schoolers. And perhaps they are grown and experienced enough that they do not need the extra practise - for instance, if I already have the ability to write an email, perhaps in some cases it would be more productive to use AI to automate it, instead of spending maybe half an hour writing a long email. Of course, I’m making a huge generalisation here. But for the younger children, I’m not so sure if they have the same ability to judge, or be able to edit the AI-made product after it’s done.

So my question now is why are we giving AI to such young children to use when there are seemingly few beenfits they would glean out of it, in the long run? Taking the easy way up would just lead to a deterioriation of our muscles. And there’s nothing we need more than critical thinking skills in this voltatile new world today. So, really, why are we letting the budding young minds get sucked into this shortcut, that is dulling their brains and slowing their strides?

2. AI and art

I loathe to even use the word ‘AI art’, because it’s not art; but ‘AI-generated images’ take too long to write, which is ironic conisdering the very topic of disdain today is the laziness of AI image generators, who have the balls to call themselves ‘AI artists’.

I think I have gone quite off topic. Back to ‘AI-generated images’. Everyone argues about the ‘soul’ of human art, and how it is lacking in ‘AI art’; many in favour of the AI overlords would probably pull up that one Twitter post where someone claimed he generated a Monet-style painting, then asked what’s worse about it than a real Monet, to whcih people began roasting it visciously. In the end, it was gleefully revealed by the poster to be a real Monet all along. So this shows the quality of AI images and that of real human art has now become almost fully indistinguishable. Hence AI = human art, right?

Well, not at all. To me. And I’m sure many others who also argue for the vitality of the ‘soul’ component in art, would also support with the fact that the purpose of art has always been to convey a message from one human bring to another. A snippet, a rendition of how one individual sees the world and experiences the wonderful and terrible things in it, which is then interpreted uniquely by each member of its audience. This requires emotional effort and focused attention on each end - from the artmaking process, when the artist makes a series of conscious choices to infuse their own feelings and messages into the artwork, and the viewer, who relates what they absorbed from the artwork to their own personal experiences. This is an exchange of the minds and thought processes of two people, who could possibly have never interacted in their lives before, and it was unique to each creator and audience member.

Now, however… things seem to have changed. Now, it is no longer required for the creator to put much thought forward when creating an ‘artwork’; I mean, what’s the need when Mr. Gippity can just make it for you? There is now an imbalance of efforts between the creator and the viewer; the viewer attempts to draw or intepret the meaning and experience from the artwork, and tries to relate it to their own life. But if the creator had not infused any meaning - or, rather, the medium they chose to deliver the work with had no concrete experiences to draw from - what is there to extract by the viewer?

Here is where those who argue art is only practical for aesthetics would diverge with my argument. But I believe the introduction of AI-generated images would really reinforce the dichotomy of this argument. If the true value of the arts was really only laid in the beauty aspect of it, most art would have no value; instead, the stencilled, obdient AI trained on millions of aesthetic images would be the clear winner. But we see that it is not the case. And here’s an important point: AI cannot produce ‘good’ things. It can make ‘good enough’, but it can never be spectacular. Because, ultimately, it was trained on the humans that came before it. It is the literal distorted amalgamation of everything on the internet; and most importantly, it can’t be two things at once; so, of course, it is the normal distribution when it outputs anything. It simply cannot be outstanding; it cannot be precise, it cannot be as exact as a human being who has had unique experiences, who felt it in a specific, special way. AI can attempt, but it cannot, even with the most detailed prompts, fully replicate or illustrate the representation of how a real human being, with five senses and true feelings, can experience the world and what surrounds them. All AI can do is generalise and, as the result of that, homogenise what it can give you. Only humans are capable of judgement; to tell when something’s just right, or even fabulous.

And to me, that should be cherished above all.