If you ask the folks developing AI about how they intend to make sure this technology will be beneficial, you get an earful about “alignment.” Their thinking is, if a less powerful entity (humanity) is to have a good relationship with a more powerful one (their imagined Artificial General Intelligence, AGI) the less powerful entity needs to make sure the more powerful entity’s values and goals are “aligned” with its own.
This is an incredibly problematic way to think about the relationship between AI, as a technology, and humans for a variety of reasons (assumes AI will become an independent, nearly all-powerful actor, assumes “humans” have a single set of values to “align” with, etc) but in the case of an alliance between an educators’ union and AI vendors, like the recently announced partnership between OpenAI/Microsoft/Anthropic and AFT, it becomes a useful analogy.
You see the values and goals of educators and ed-tech vendors are not “aligned” when it comes to AI. Educators have many goals when it comes to this technology. We want students to understand it better, we want them to think critically about it, we want them to build the skills they need – inside themselves – to exist in the world regardless of its technological infrastructure.
Critically, this means educators need to think about when to not use AI tools in their teaching. They need to think about why they might not want to use a commercial AI product, and instead engage with open-source or non-commercial alternatives (which do exist!).
AI vendors, in contrast, have only one goal: to maximize the “engagement” with their platforms, which they spent vast sums developing (and which they promised the people who lent them those vast sums would become world-spanning tools of almost unthinkable power).
These goals are not in alignment, and the AI companies, some of the biggest and wealthiest corporations on the planet, are the much more powerful entity.
Encouraging educators to understand AI is a good idea. Encouraging them to engage critically with AI is a good idea. “Partnering” with an entity more powerful than you with values that are badly out of alignment with your own is a bad idea.
