Artificial intelligence

This document sets out the position of the Department for Education (DfE) on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Google Bard, in the education sector.

This statement:

• is informed by the government’s white paper on a pro-innovation approach to AI regulation
• follows the government’s announcement to set up an expert Frontier AI Taskforce to help the UK adopt the next generation of safe AI

It is well-documented and often repeated in teachers’ professional development that the right type of co-learning can deepen understanding and long-term knowledge gains. The critical question is, “What is the right type of co-learning?” Sometimes group projects work well. Sometimes one partner does all the work and another just coasts along for the ride. How are teachers supposed to grade these efforts? Give everyone the same grade? Let students grade each other’s contributions? Try to guess how much time each student put in? There is no perfect solution.

While the reading and math “wars” have gotten a lot of attention in education in recent years, writing instruction has not received that same focus. That is, until the release of ChatGPT last year.

There isn’t really an agreed-upon approach to teaching writing, according to Sarah Levine, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. But now that ChatGPT is here to stay, experts like Levine are trying to figure how to teach writing to K-12 students in an age of AI.

AI has the potential to enhance education, but how does AI impact teachers? And how can we ensure it doesn't disrupt the quality of learning?

This Guidance is designed to respond to this urgent need. However, a thematic set of guidance on GenAI for education should not be understood as a claim that GenAI is the solution to education’s fundamental challenges. Despite the media hyperbole, it is unlikely that GenAI alone will solve any of the problems facing education systems around the world. In responding to long-standing educational issues, it is key to uphold the idea that human capacity and collective action, and not technology, is the determining factor in effective solutions to fundamental challenges faced by societies.

This Guidance therefore aims to support the planning of appropriate regulations, policies, and human capacity development programmes, to ensure that GenAI becomes a tool that genuinely benefits and empowers teachers, learners and researchers. Building on UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the Guidance is anchored in a human-centred approach that promotes human agency, inclusion, equity, gender equality, cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as plural opinions and expressions.

The Guidance first looks into what GenAI is and how it works, presenting the diverse technologies and models available (Section 1), before identifying a range of controversial ethical and policy issues around both AI in general, and GenAI specifically (Section 2). This is followed by a discussion of the steps and key elements to be examined when seeking to regulate GenAI based on a human-centred approach – one that ensures ethical, safe, equitable and meaningful use (Section 3). Section 4 then proposes measures that can be taken to develop coherent, comprehensive policy frameworks to regulate the use of GenAI in education and research, while Section 5 looks into the possibilities for creatively using GenAI in curriculum design, teaching, learning and research activities. Section 6, concludes the Guidance with considerations around the long-term implications of GenAI for education and research.Guidance for generative AI in education and research.

Just days after OpenAI dropped ChatGPT in late November 2022, the chatbot was widely denounced as a free essay-writing, test-taking tool that made it laughably easy to cheat on assignments.

Los Angeles Unified, the second-­largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s website from its schools’ network. Others soon joined. By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia.

Several leading universities in the UK, including Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, issued statements that warned students against using ChatGPT to cheat.