What do you think?
Do you think AI could replace me?
Hello and welcome back to the Easy English Podcast, where we explore real world topics in slow and clear English.
And I'm going to help you stay informed in English with things happening around the world.
I'm Oliver and today we are talking about an interesting topic because it's directly related to what I am doing right now.
And in a way that is education.
And this will affect you whether you're a student or a teacher.
We're asking the big question.
Could artificial intelligence, AI, ever replace human teachers?
With AI chatbots, online courses, apps and all of this technology changing so quickly, how will it affect the jobs of teachers and also how you study?
I'm sure you have already noticed a difference in the study materials and ways of study available to you.
But how might this change in the future and how might it affect the education industry?
So as always.
We are going to look at five new pieces of key vocabulary.
Some of them are obvious.
You probably know already, but we will learn many more words throughout the episode.
I always like to focus on five at the start.
So let's read our five vocabulary list before we begin and listen for these phrases and words.
The first one.
I've already said many times, but I have to explain it just in case someone doesn't know it, because I will say it so many times.
And that is artificial intelligence, AI.
And that is technology that can think or act like a human.
It can learn and develop.
So many schools now use AI to help students with maths and writing, for example.
The next point is personalized learning.
This is a phrase, personalized learning.
What personalized means is it means it is designed to meet an individual. an individual's needs.
So you can have a personalized diet, a personalized workout plan, or personalized learning.
So it's a way of teaching that is designed to meet a student's individual needs.
For example, AI programs can offer personalized learning based on your strengths and weaknesses.
The third phrase that I want you to learn today so we have mainly phrases today is critical thinking, critical thinking.
And this is the ability to think clearly and evaluate information.
For example, a good teacher helps students to build strong critical thinking skills.
Our fourth phrase today is a very important one.
It's a phrase that I have used in many episodes before, and that is emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence.
And that is understanding your own and others' emotions.
You might remember this from the leadership episode at the beginning of the week.
And our final phrase is digital divide.
Digital divide.
This is the gap between people who have access to technology and those who don't.
For example, the digital divide. can make online learning harder for students in poorer areas.
So they have less access to the internet, to technology, than those in more rich or wealthy areas, which causes a digital divide.
Okay, lots of phrases there.
Don't worry if you know them all.
There are many other phrases and words that I will use in this episode that will hopefully be new for you too.
So we're going to get started into the main episode.
Try to look out for those words.
But very quickly, first, I want to remind you that there is a Patreon link in the description below.
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Okay, so let's get started.
And the first thing we're going to look at is what is already happening in this education space.
So for many years, I guess AI has been developing and it isn't really science fiction anymore.
It's not imaginary.
It's something real.
And it's already in many classrooms and many learning plans or methods.
There's so many apps already out there that do utilize AI.
I guess for a long time, people have been using many language learning apps like Duolingo.
I think there's like...
I don't want to advertise anything here because I'm not sponsored by any apps, but you know and use them as well.
There's many, many applications out there, and some of them do utilize AI already to help learners learn at their own pace, help them self study.
And some schools already are even using AI artificial intelligence to grade essays, to mark essays, to assess them or even to suggest lessons based on test results.
For example, a student that struggles with mathematics might receive extra exercises automatically.
This is called adaptive learning.
So adaptive learning is when the learning is personalized.
It adapts to the individual, to the person.
It's great for revision and also support.
But even though these tools are very useful this is my opinion they don't mean that the teacher will disappear.
In fact, many AI tools today are designed to help teachers.
They're to help the people who are delivering the education rather than to replace them.
But I guess There's a reason why I'm making this podcast episode today, this topic.
And it's because I have noticed a trend in my own space.
And that is, of course, podcasts and English language content.
There are so many English podcasts that I've noticed now that have started in the last two years, which are entirely AI generated.
So what do i mean by that?
They not only have ai scripts, but they're also ai voiced.
So it is not even a real native english speaker speaking in these podcasts.
They are computer generated voices, ai voices that speak the entire podcast, sometimes with multiple guests, multiple people, And some of these podcasts are massive.
They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube.
And from reading the comments, people think they are real people.
They believe that these people are real and that they're having conversations.
And perhaps because it's quite hard now to detect especially if you're not a native speaker.
It's hard to detect AI with foreign languages if you're not so familiar with the language yourself.
So why do I think this is a problem?
I think it's a problem because, at the moment, AI is definitely not perfect.
Native speakers, of course, are not perfect either.
Like myself, i have lots of pauses, sometimes i can mispronounce a word, maybe i use incorrect grammar from time to time, but regardless of the mistakes that i may make, as a native speaker who's a human, it is natural.
They are natural mistakes and it's a natural way of speaking.
So for you learning, I hope it is a natural way of learning and you're going to pick up normal habits and normal way of speech.
But learning from a robot is unnatural.
And when I listen to these podcasts and these episodes, to me, it sounds very unnatural.
And I'm quite concerned that people are modeling and learning their speaking off of these AI models, because it is not natural speech.
Even the text is unnatural.
It's quite formal, quite strange as well.
So that's where this topic idea came from.
But there are some things and I've made some notes here that I think AI does well in education and with language learning as well.
But there are many things that I don't think that it does well.
The first is it's very fast.
So of course it can produce lots of content for learners and it can provide assistance, I guess very, very quickly and often much faster than a real person or a real teacher like myself.
It can also give instant feedback.
So it can immediately mark your answers, give you an answer back and answer any questions you have.
And finally, of course, it doesn't get tired.
It doesn't have a schedule.
It isn't limited by the number of hours in the day in the same way that a teacher or a human is.
It can do so much more in such a short time.
It's available when you need it. pretty much always.
But there are a few things that it really struggles with.
And the first I would say is that it doesn't have real human emotions and it lacks that empathy.
Whereas a teacher even take myself, for example I have studied other languages and I understand the struggles and the difficulties with learning another language.
So I can teach you in a way that I understand how you struggle.
I understand what you find difficult and some of those challenges with learning English.
And AI, artificial intelligence, really, it copies these emotions at the moment.
And it's not very genuine.
It's very hard for it to show emotional intelligence with others.
Perhaps this will change in the future, but for now I really don't see that changing, within education especially.
And it also does not really understand both cultural or emotional context as well.
So with that emotional intelligence it's very hard for it to understand from the context that you're speaking and as well
It is very hard for AI to motivate and build relationships in the same way that a human can.
And I believe that relationships are very important with education, with language learning.
Even with this podcast.
Although I do not personally know you, I like to think that as we have these episodes and as I talk to you, You get to know me a little bit more as well, my opinions, my views, what I talk about.
And over time, this can really help you with your learning.
You're developing a kind of student-teacher relationship with me, even through these podcasts.
You're getting used to my voice, my way of speaking.
And this all helps.
It really helps.
Even though it's a podcast, there's still a real human element there.
So I think these are some of the real drawbacks over using AI and artificial intelligence for English education.
But many learners of course need so much more than just information that AI can kind of provide, more than just the structure and feedback.
They also need the encouragement, the fun and that human element and social learning around it too.
So, in my opinion, i don't think that any use of ai tools is going to get rid of teachers.
In the long term, i think that a lot of ai projects and softwares and they will be really useful for learning, but i think the human element will always stay there.
I'm curious what you think.
So, if we look into the future and how AI is going to change, most of what I've talked about today is the current state of things so far.
So how advanced AI is at the moment the types of tools that we have at the moment, but in the future, AI will, of course, continue to get more and more advanced.
And this is where it gets a little bit more unclear from my side.
I'm not too sure how this will continue to affect things in the future.
AI could, in theory, become even more natural.
It could develop emotional intelligence, or at least it can pretend to have emotional intelligence to a level that is very, very good.
And it can of course, create even more complex lessons and personalized learning for students, perhaps more than a teacher.
But even if this happens, there might still be some problems.
And those problems are the exact same what I've said.
So that kind of relationship element, the human element, particularly with face-to-face learning as well, and even access to technology.
So if we look at that vocabulary we mentioned before with the digital divide, there are going to be certain areas, certain people that are not going to have access to this new futuristic high-tech technology as much as others.
Perhaps with the development of AI a lot of these systems will charge money and become quite expensive because we already know they use so much energy, so much power, so much computing power around the world.
It's very difficult for it to remain free and it will have to be monetized in some way.
Particularly in the education sphere, a lot of these apps and services charge subscriptions.
And this can be quite expensive as a study aid alongside teaching.
There are some dangers with AI I think with learning sometimes.
Something which I never experienced with my language learning, because AI has not really been around when I began my learning.
And that is I think sometimes the challenge to critical thinking.
So critical thinking, like I mentioned, is that ability to think clearly and evaluate information on your own.
With the likes of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems.
It is doing a lot of critical thinking for us.
So we can give it the problem, we can give it the text, we can give it something that we need to get the correct answers for, and it will do the work for us.
And this is great for productivity, but how will this affect the critical thinking skills of a student in the long term?
You know, will it hinder?
So will it slow down and reduce progress?
Perhaps.
Another threat to education in general that people say with language education is often discussed as translation, so AI translation.
So this ability it already exists with the likes of Google Translate to say something and have it translated by a computer automatically and then repeated in that language.
And perhaps in the future we will be able to use devices to automatically translate what the other person is saying in their language and hear it in our language.
I do think this will probably be a reality at some point in the future.
Perhaps not a widespread so a common reality in our lifetimes, but it will be absolutely in the future.
But I still don't think that this is going to stop language learning.
Learning another language allows you to think and understand in that language.
It develops our brain in so many different ways.
And using an AI model or a piece of technology to do that for us is going to not really replace all of those other benefits around connection, around culture, around understanding that we actually get from learning the language.
And even from just that benefit for our brain, learning a language is so good for you.
Using your critical thinking skills is so good for you.
And replacing these with a computer, replacing these with an AI model is not going to help.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I think that AI is fantastic.
I think it's an amazing technology and I utilize AI every single day.
I use it with this project to subtitle my videos.
I use it to then produce transcripts for the videos and to organize and edit texts as well.
But the likes of me speaking to you and the words that I'm saying, the contents that I'm producing, I want to keep that natural.
So I will never replace my speech with AI.
I will never replace my thoughts with AI.
And to me, that is quite a scary concept.
So I do think that AI has its place and I think that it is helping particularly smaller creators like myself, and teachers and individuals to be able to do so much more with less, which is an amazing time to be alive.
There's so much opportunity.
And I think that with learning English, you have so much opportunity to use AI with things like vocabulary learning, with things like reading and writing and grammar, but don't use it to replace the real human things that you need.
It's just my advice, the likes of speaking, listening, you need that real input.
There's something about that natural speech, that natural listening, which I think is going to be very, very hard to replace with machine learning and with the output that comes from that.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I do think that there's so much cultural, so much natural background behind learning, real speech, real thought, and then the listening practice that comes from that, that I just I would never replace that with something that is artificial.
But of course, time will tell.
I'm not going to say I'm right.
I think that time will change a lot with technology in education.
So to summarise my thoughts, could AI replace teachers?
Not completely.
At least not yet.
AI is a really powerful tool in whatever form that it can come in.
I know it's such a generic general phrase, but when it's used well, it can really support both students and teachers.
But education, as I've said, is much more than just data.
It's much more than productivity.
It's about growth.
It's about support.
And it's about relationships.
And for now and in the foreseeable future, in our lifetimes, at least in the next 10, 20 years, I think that only real people will be able to give that to the top level.
Essentially,
So if you're learning English, do use some AI tools.
You're probably already using some AI tools as well.
But you're also learning from, you know, a real human voice with emotions connection, and you're probably utilizing a lot of a real human side too.
So as things go forward in the future, be careful how you use AI.
Use it to serve yourself and make sure that you're not just consuming only AI content.
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Goodbye.
