AI is everywhere in education. Students are using it, and staff too. But there is a darker side to the AI revolution.
Some students have become victims of blackmail based on artificially-generated pornographic photos and videos, created from unwisely gifted selfies but also from publicly available pictures on the websites and social media accounts of colleges themselves.
How many of us are even alert to this?
Rife AI abuse is already the bane of safeguarding leads’ lives. In other countries, teachers have already lost their jobs for producing deepfake child pornography.
But AI is also being used against teachers. It’s only a matter of time before lives are ruined.
The number of complaints against teachers seems sadly to be on the rise. A huge proportion are dismissed as vexatious and not upheld, but final acquittals are often based on a lack of supporting evidence.
What happens when evidence is produced to strengthen a complaint? That obviously makes a case quicker and easier to resolve. Guilt is then easy to apportion and difficult to avoid.
A video is shown of a teacher making a racist statement in a lesson. Case closed. A photo is presented showing a teacher in a compromising sexual situation. Case closed. An audio recording is played of a teacher propositioning a student. Case closed. The story has been heard before. Another creepy teacher. Another racist corrupting our kids. Lives ruined.
But how can evidence be trusted in a world awash with AI? If a student complaint comes with apparently strong supporting evidence, the teacher involved could never survive for long with no realistic defence. But apparent evidence can now be easily generated in seconds, at the click of a couple of buttons.
That is all it would take to fake the evidence that would break a career. And the speed of technological advance makes it increasingly hard to distinguish real facts from AI fiction. Management’s soothing reassurances about applying common sense cannot cut it anymore.
How could a teacher defend themselves adequately in such a nightmarish scenario? It would be impossible with evidence as crystal clear as can be, in full digital and Dolby quality.
I don’t envy investigating managers, who require the wisdom of Solomon in our age. And I don’t envy the teachers who are about to find themselves in such situations.
It surely won’t be long before teachers lose their jobs on the back of AI-produced deepfakes. Which obscure but conscientious teacher currently toiling away quietly in an unsuspecting classroom will be first to have their career scuppered, their character traduced and relationships ruined because of a creative and IT-savvy student with a grudge?
That teacher victim is as yet wholly unaware of how a photo of them could already have been manipulated, or an audio clip secretly recorded and doctored to make them say something misleading which they would never say in reality.
I don’t think we teachers are ready for what is about to hit us. We lack the tools or knowledge to defend ourselves.
In the government’s latest advice on AI use in schools, there is plenty about how to integrate the technology into the everyday life of a school, and about keeping children safe. But there is absolutely nothing about deep-fake complaints against teachers.
Likewise with the teaching unions’ websites and AI guidance. This isn’t even being talked about yet. But we need to get ready now because it’s coming.
Are we going to wait until an innocent teacher is condemned, protesting their innocence and impotently questioning the evidence that has been used to accuse them?
Where will those teachers be able to turn for support and advice when they are accused? You can bet the nation’s newspapers will show them no mercy when the matter is made public.
The first teacher to have their life ruined by AI is out there somewhere today, planning lessons, marking work, training students in the arts of learning, as yet wholly unaware of the juggernaut that is about to smash into their life.
And I am sadly sure that in some dimly lit bedroom somewhere soon, the evidence that destroys them will be surreptitiously produced.
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