LAUSD adopts a chatbot too early
Los Angeles Unified School District students came back to their campuses last week, with all the attendant opportunities — Another school year for our young ones! A chance to do better this time, study harder! Football, cheer squads! — and problems a fall semester entails — Boring homework! Early rising! L.A. Freeway traffic back to gridlock!
So there are hopes and fears, as ever. But one fear is off the table for the time being, thanks to the epic failure of the district’s vaunted entry into the world of artificial intelligence, the chatbot called Ed. Yes — get it? Ed.
Not only did the robot for LAUSD students touted as a personal assistant — “capable of connecting them to mental health resources, informing them of cafeteria menus and waking them up in the morning.” according to reporter Mallika Seshadri of EdSource — go down in flames, it’s sparked a revolt by both parents and teachers.
“Roughly a month after the Los Angeles Unified School District revoked its AI chatbot, Ed, communities of parents, teachers and experts are demanding that the school district respond to their concern that the short-lived association with AllHere, the company that built and supported the program, has potentially compromised data on the district’s larger educational priorities,” EdSource reports. Swell.
This has all the hallmarks of a classic bureaucratic boondoggle by a school district incapable of launching high-technology efforts that are quite obviously above the ability of administrators to choose and oversee. AI — or at least the newfangled, world-changing new iterations based on large language models that are rapidly becoming so powerful that even computer scientists say they don’t quite understand how it works — is not something to enter into lightly. Three months after the district announced it would create Ed, parent company AllHere laid off most of its staff and its CEO abandoned ship.
Technically, the district still owns Ed. A spokesperson for the LAUSD said the chatbot will be available to its students and families when the “human-in-the-loop aspect is re-established.”
Clearly, the district got into the glitchy new AI too early. It needs to step back from chatbots lest they achieve the singularity right here while our human backs are turned.