AI is Here to Help Us

Artificial intelligence is going to do remarkably well when it comes to making learners smarter and stronger. Traditional K-12 leadership, trying to ban AI from their schools, will lose. AI is just too powerful a force for us not to figure out how to use it to improve learning – for everyone.

I recently read an article titled “The End of Foreign-Language Education,” printed March 26^th in The Atlantic online. The article begins,

“A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. ‘My favorite food is sushi,’ I said – wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi – with no hint of excitement or joy.”

“I’d created the video using software from a Los Angeles-based artificial-intelligence start-up called HeyGen. It allows users to generate deepfake videos of real people ‘saying’ almost anything based on a single picture of their face and a script, which is paired with a synthetic voice and can be translated into more than 40 languages. By merely uploading a selfie taken on my iPhone, I was able to glimpse a level of Mandarin fluency that may elude me for the rest of my life.”

“HeyGen’s visuals are flawed – the way it animates selfies almost reminded me of the animatronics in Disney’s It’s a Small World ride – but its language technology is good enough to make me question whether learning Mandarin is a wasted effort. Neural networks, the machine-learning systems that power generative-AI programs such as ChatGPT, have rapidly improved the quality of automatic translation over the past several years, making even older tools like Google Translate far more accurate.”

“At the same time, the number of students studying foreign languages in the U.S. and other countries is shrinking. Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, according to the latest data from the Modern Language Association, better known as the MLA. In Australia, only 8.6 percent of high-school seniors were studying a foreign language in 2021 – a historic low. In South Korea and New Zealand, universities are closing their French, German, and Italian departments. One recent study from the education company EF Education First found that English proficiency is decreasing among young people in some places.”

“Many factors could help explain the downward trend, including pandemic-related school disruptions, growing isolationism, and funding cuts to humanities programs. But whether the cause of the shift is political, cultural, or some mix of things, it’s clear that people are turning away from language learning just as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous across the internet.”

“Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one. Something enormous will be lost in exchange for that convenience. Studies have suggested that language shapes the way people interpret reality. Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world – experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by community that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.”

“AI language tools are now in social-media apps, messaging platforms, and streaming sites. Spotify is experimenting with using a voice-generation tool from the ChatGPT maker Open AI to translate podcasts in the host’s own voice, while Samsung is touting that its new Galaxy S24 smartphone can translate phone calls as they’re occurring. Roblox, meanwhile, claimed last month that its AI translation tool is so fast and accurate, its English-speaking users might not realize that their conversation partner ‘is actually in Korea.’ The technology – which works especially well for ‘high-resource languages’ such as English and Chinese, and less so for languages such as Swahili and Urdu – is being used in much more high-stakes situations as well, such as translating the testimony of asylum seekers and firsthand accounts from conflict zones. Musicians are already using it to translate songs, and at least one could credited it with helping them to fall in love.”

…

I guess there’s some nostalgia involved in learning a second language. My oldest son learned Spanish during the pandemic. But I find it difficult to think that using AI as a learning assistant, in foreign language and beyond, isn’t a good use of time and energy.

Frankly, given the choice of learning a foreign language or depending on my AI assistant to help me translate Dutch into English, I’m choosing the latter. And, I believe most folks will agree with me, whether it involves learning a foreign language, a science lesson, or writing a piece of music.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB