ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Did you know March 27th is National AI Literacy Day? It aims to prepare educators and students on how to adapt to the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.

According to a recent NBC poll, 57% of Americans don’t feel the benefits of AI outweigh the risks.

News10NBC spoke with local education students and educators at Roberts Wesleyan University’s AI symposium on Friday after about how they’re planning to adapt to this new technology.

Education professors plan ahead

“The first thing I think [education students] have to do is develop that critical lens and really understand what the tool is, said Dr. Maryanne Barrett, an assistant professor of education at Roberts Wesleyan.

“What the benefits and risks are, and really understand what the purpose is. Our goal is to help our students understand the complexities of AI. From there, they can make the choice of, ‘is this something I want to use or not,’” Barrett said.

“Our students that are emerging into the field as teachers, they are having opportunities to build lesson plans and to generate activities for students and to ask it questions and things like that,” said Joy Pansari, another assistant professor of education.

Urging caution

Fellow presenter Matt Altobelli is a psychology professor at RIT and Chief Science Officer of the bias detection AI platform, CogBias. He urges caution for tomorrow’s students and teachers.

“I am a little bit worried for the future, just seeing how people use it today,” Altobelli said.

“It should be used more of as a tool and keeping the human in the loop. But you are in control as the human. So I want the students to maintain their control and education, rather than giving it up to something else that is sometimes wrong anyway,” he said.

Education students react

“Right as soon as we entered college it started to enter the game. So kind of navigating not only how does it impact us as students, but also our future students. We kind of have a dual perspective being teacher education students,” said Jenna Rivera, a junior year education student, who plans to teach grades 5 through 12.

But she and fellow student Zoey Chandler agree – AI can’t replace a human teacher.

“[AI] can try, but it doesn’t have that humanistic element that teachers bring. And so what’s always made teachers great is this humanistic element and this down to earth love and care that they have for their students and that will remain. It cannot do that,” Chandler said.

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