Are these AI prompts damaging your thinking skills? What was the last thing you asked an AI chatbot to do for you? Maybe you asked it for an essay structure to help answer a tricky question, provide an insightful analysis of a chunky data set, or to check if your cover letter matches the job description. Some experts worry that outsourcing these kinds of tasks means your brain is working less - and could even be harming your critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a study showing that people who used ChatGPT to write essays showed less activity in brain networks associated with cognitive processing while undertaking the exercise.

AI tools have become deeply embedded in how many students learn and complete schoolwork--and that usage is only poised to increase. On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers announced an AI training hub for educators, backed by 23 million from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The AFT is the second-largest teachers' union, representing 1.8 million teachers and educational staffers across the country. Their training hub will open in New York City this fall, featuring workshops that will educate teachers on how to use AI tools for tasks like generating lesson plans and quizzes, or writing emails to parents. Microsoft is providing 12.5 million for AI teacher training over the next five years.

On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he was interested in a career in the arts, and he devoted a lot of his free time to photo shoots with his friends. But he had recently decided on a more practical path: he wanted to become a C.P.A. His Thursdays were busy, and he had forty-five minutes until a study session for an accounting class. He stowed his skateboard under a bench in the restaurant and shook his laptop out of his bag, connecting to the internet before we sat down. Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area.

This spring, the Los Angeles Unified School District--the second-largest public school district in the United States--introduced students and parents to a new "educational friend" named Ed. A learning platform that includes a chatbot represented by a small illustration of a smiling sun, Ed is being tested in 100 schools within the district and is accessible at all hours through a website. It can answer questions about a child's courses, grades, and attendance, and point users to optional activities. As Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho put it to me, "AI is here to stay. If you don't master it, it will master you." Carvalho says he wants to empower teachers and students to learn to use AI safely.

Teachers themselves are exploring the potential of this rapidly developing technology, too. Jonathan Wharmby, who teaches computer science at Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School in Liverpool, uses AI to help with planning and creating resources, such as multiple choice questions - but said there were issues.

Former English teacher, Peter Laffin, predicts OpenAI's new artificial intelligence chatbot will lead to a learning crisis and force teachers to rethink education. The emergence of artificial intelligence chatbots that can complete students' assignments will lead to a crisis in learning, forcing educators to rethink schooling entirely, a former teacher said. "The introduction of new artificial intelligence technologies into schools that enables students to auto-generate essays has the capacity to blow up our entire writing education curriculum," Peter Laffin, founder of Crush the College Essay and writing coach, told Fox News. "It may make us have to rethink it from the ground up, and that might ultimately be a good thing." Last week, tech company OpenAI unveiled an AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which has stunned users with its advanced functions.

When schools closed this spring, many parents, including me, felt overwhelmed and underwater trying to help our children participate in distance learning. Every day seemed to usher in a new way for my husband and me to fail at reading emails, managing logins, printing worksheets, troubleshooting tech problems, photographing assignments, and keeping track of class Zooms. Being an educator as well as a parent gave my experience a particularly nightmarish quality, as if I were somehow both the driver and pedestrian in this collision. As a teacher, I participated in a flurry of trainings on using various apps to make videos, find e-books, host meetings, use data, and share student work, but as a parent, I could not keep up. It doesn't have to be this hard.

What is the secret to success? Researchers say'implicit beliefs' are the key to a successful career Who succeeds doesn't depend on just intentions, like being present, experts reveal your implicit beliefs reveal whether you will or will not be successful Students were asked to quickly indicate whether each of a series of words was related to'schoolwork,' was a synonym of'importance' or was a synonym of'unimportance.' Rather than depend on people's explicit beliefs, in our research researchers looked instead to people's implicit beliefs. The team used used a computer-based test called the'Implicit Association Test (IAT)' to measure our participants' implicit beliefs Student participants were asked to indicate, as quickly as they could, using computer keys, whether each of a series of words was related to'schoolwork,' was a synonym of'importance' or was a synonym of'unimportance' In five of our studies, researchers used the test to measure students' cognitive association between'importance' and'schoolwork.' The found that college students' implicit belief in the importance of schoolwork predicted who got higher grades This article was originally published on The Conversation. No comments have so far been submitted.