“You wouldn’t pass the Turing Test!” As a nerdy teenager, it was my go-to burn for sportier tormentors.
It’s doubtful they understood my reference to the test of a machine’s ability to pass itself off as human. Now, adults who wouldn’t pass the Turing Test dominate news-column inches with their evangelism for a technology that has just bluffed its way to surpassing them.
In the mid-1980s I had the game ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ on my Amstrad 464, which learned from each round you played with it.
AI was lame then, and its 2025 descendants, ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek, aren’t much better. It’s not that I haven’t tried to engage, it’s just that what they produce is usually plagiarised, or wrong, or garbage quality.
But you have to know what good looks like to see that, I suppose.
Neither they nor the technology know what they don’t know
It’s one thing to waste your own time creating inane images of personalised action figures to post on Bebo, but no filter is being applied before wasting education funding that would be better spent on teachers and CPD.
Those clueless about pedagogy are advocating we hand it over to AI, because neither they nor the technology know what they don’t know.
That couldn’t be better illustrated than in the recent news of a government-funded tool to assess the quality of students’ soldering in technical qualifications with an AI app. It will save teachers “minutes”.
Let’s leave aside for a moment the inherent benefit of a teacher having an opportunity to meaningfully check a student’s progress. After all, we wouldn’t want to do anything to suggest FE teachers add a professional, human value beyond what an app can do. Otherwise, we might have to give them a pay rise.
Let’s also ignore that you don’t need AI to test soldering, you could just try running a current through it.
Instead, let’s consider all the progress made in feedback and assessment in the last two decades. In theory, the days of students seeking validation for first attempts with no self-improvement are long gone. The sheer number of dull meetings I’ve attended about green and purple pens, and self-marking, and Directed Improvement and Reflection Time (I still shudder at that acronym) would certainly make me hope so.
But rather than having a student grab a multimeter and check their soldering themselves, this app bypasses the actual learning.
Let’s be honest, circuit-boards are mass-soldered by machines anyway. In the minds of the edtech bros advocating for this AI nonsense, we’re only humouring disadvantaged students on technical courses with the dream of working in electronics until they can drive the van that delivers new, Chinese-built electronic goodies.
Real educators see something different. They see mountains of e-waste and the value that a skilled human can bring to ensuring the sustainability of technology.
They don’t begrudge a student formative feedback, although they probably expect that the student does their own diagnostic work first. And teaching how to use a multimeter is higher on their agenda than a wasteful and damaging taxpayer-funded gimmick.
As with every edtech fad, it’s students from poorer backgrounds who are inevitably the guinea pigs and who pay the price in their outcomes and experience.
I imagine AI probably can plan lessons and mark better than the least effective teachers. But the real solution is more funding for better recruitment and training.
If teaching is just about meeting a low bar, and an app beats the weakest 5 per cent of human staff to it, then pay will plateau at that percentile. What we need is for teacher pay to be set aspirationally to raise the profession to an elite.
When state-funded education ends up palmed off onto a jumped-up Tamagotchi, those with the resources to make the choice will opt to pay extra for skilled and compassionate humans. And so the disadvantage gap will widen. The AI evangelism is class war.
This is the last chance to resist. Keep planning your lessons because planning your lessons makes you a better teacher and exercises the professional creativity that is part of what makes the job brilliant.
Keep marking because it makes your students feel valued, and good lord, they need that.
Most importantly, keep remembering AI is a parlour trick that couldn’t exist without the sum of human knowledge and creativity it feeds on.
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