What do you think? Do you think AI could replace
me? Hello and welcome back to the
Easy English Podcast where we explore real world topics in
slow and clear English. And I'm going to help you stay
informed in English with things happening around the world.
I'm Oliver. And today we are talking about
an interesting topic because it's directly related to what I
am doing right now. And in a way that is education.
And this will affect you whether you're a student or a teacher.
We're asking the big question, could artificial intelligence AI
ever replace human teachers with AI?
Chat bots, online courses, apps and all of this technology
changing so quickly? How will it affect the jobs of
teachers and also how you study? I'm sure you have already
noticed a difference in the study materials and ways of
study available to you, but how might this change in the future
and how might it affect the education industry?
So as always, we are going to look at 5 new pieces of key
vocabulary. Some of them are obvious, you
probably know already, but we will learn many more words
throughout the episode. I always like to focus on five
at the start. So let's read our five
vocabulary list before we begin and listen for these phrases and
words. The first one I've already said
many times, but I have to explain it just in case someone
doesn't know it because I will say it so many times.
And that is artificial intelligence, AI, and that is
technology that can think or act like a human.
It can learn and develop. So many schools now use AI to
help students with maths and writing, for example.
The next point is personalized learning, and this is a phrase
personalized learning. What personalized means is it
means it is designed to meet an individual, an individual's
needs. So you can have a personalized
diet, a personalized workout plan or personalized learning.
So it's a way of teaching that is designed to meet a student's
individual needs. For example, AI programs can
offer personalized learning based on your strengths and
weaknesses. The third phrase that I want you
to learn today, so we have mainly phrases today, is
critical thinking, critical thinking.
And this is the ability to think clearly and evaluate
information. For example, a good teacher
helps students to build strong critical thinking skills.
Our 4th phrase today is a very important one.
It's a phrase that I have used in many episodes before and that
is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence and that
is understanding your own and others emotions.
This you might remember this from the leadership episode at
the beginning of the week. And our final phrase is digital
divide. Digital divide, This is the gap
between people who have access to technology and those who
don't. For example, the digital divide
can make online learning harder for students in poorer areas, so
they have less access to the Internet, to technology than
those in more rich or wealthy areas, which causes a digital
divide. OK, lots of phrases there.
Don't worry if you know them all.
There are many other phrases and words that I will use in this
episode that will hopefully be new for you too.
So we're going to get started into the main episode.
Try to look out for those words, but very quickly first, I want
to remind you that there is a Patreon link in the description
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OK, so let's get started. And the first thing we're going
to look at is what is already happening in this education
space. So for many years, I guess AI
has been developing and it isn't really science fiction anymore.
It's not imaginary, it's something real and it's already
in many classrooms and many learning plans or methods.
There's so many apps already out there that do utilize AII guess
for a long time people have been using many language learning
apps like Duolingo. I think there's like, I don't
want to advertise anything here because I'm not sponsored by any
apps, but you know, and use them as well.
There's many, many applications out there and some of them do
utilize AI already to help learners learn at their own
pace, help them self study. And some schools already are
even using AI artificial intelligence to grade essays, to
mark essays, to assess them or even to suggest lessons based on
test results. For example, a student that
struggles with mathematics might receive extra exercises
automatically. This is called adaptive
learning. So adaptive learning is when the
learning is personalized. It adapts to the individual, to
the person. It's great for revision and also
support. But even though these tools are
very useful, this is my opinion. They don't mean that the teacher
will disappear. In fact, many AI tools today are
designed to help teachers. They're to help the people who
are delivering the education rather than to replace them.
But I guess there's a reason why I'm making this podcast episode
today. This topic and it's because I
have noticed a trend in my own space, and that is of course
podcasts and English language content.
There are so many English podcasts that I've noticed now
that have started in the last two years, which are entirely AI
generated. So what do I mean by that?
They not only have AI scripts, but they're also AI voiced.
So it is not even a real native English speaker speaking in
these podcasts. They are computer generated
voices, a high voices that speak the entire podcast, sometimes
with multiple guests, multiple people.
And some of these podcasts are massive.
They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube, and
from reading the comments, people think they are real
people. They believe that these people
are real and that they're having conversations.
And perhaps because it's quite hard now to detect, especially
if you're not a native speaker, it's hard to detect AI with
foreign languages if you're not so familiar with the language
yourself. So why do I think this is a
problem? I think it's a problem because
at the moment, AI is definitely not perfect.
Native speakers, of course, are not perfect either.
Like myself, I have lots of pauses.
Sometimes I can mispronounce a word.
Maybe I use incorrect grammar from time to time.
But regardless of the mistakes that I may make as a native
speaker who's a human, it is natural.
They are natural mistakes and it's a natural way of speaking.
So for you, learning, I hope it is a natural way of learning and
you're going to pick up normal habits and normal way of speech.
But learning from a robot is unnatural.
And when I listen to these podcasts and these episodes, to
me it sounds very unnatural. And I'm quite concerned that
people are modeling and learning their speaking off of these AI
models because it is not natural speech.
Even the text is unnatural. It's quite formal, quite strange
as well. So that's where this topic idea
came from. But there are some things, and
I've made some notes here that I think AI does well in education
and with language learning as well.
But there are many things that I don't think that it does well.
The first is it's very fast. So of course it can produce lots
of content for learners and it can provide assistance, I guess
very, very quickly and often much faster than a real person
or a real teacher like myself. It can also give instant
feedback, so it can immediately mark your answers, give you an
answer back, and answer any questions you have.
And finally, of course, it doesn't get tired.
It doesn't have a schedule. It isn't limited by the number
of hours in the day in the same way that a teacher or a human
is. It can do so much more in such a
short time. It's available when you need it
pretty much always, but there are a few things that it really
struggles with. And the first I would say is
that it doesn't have real human emotions and it lacks that
empathy where as a teacher, and even take myself for example, I
have studied other languages and I understand the struggles and
the difficulties with learning another language.
So I can teach you in a way that I understand how you struggle.
I understand what you find difficult and some of those
challenges with learning English, an AI, artificial
intelligence, really, it copies these emotions at the moment and
it's not very genuine. It's very hard for it to show
emotional intelligence with others.
Perhaps this will change in the future, but for now, I really
don't see that changing within education especially.
And it also does not really understand both cultural or
emotional context as well. So with that emotional
intelligence, it's very hard for it to understand from the
context that you're speaking. And as well, it is very hard for
AI to to motivate and build relationships in the same way
that a human can. And I believe that relationships
are very important with education, with language
learning, even with this podcast.
And although I do not personally know you, I like to think that
as we have these episodes and as I talk to you, you get to know
me a little bit more as well. My opinions, my views, what I
talk about. And over time, this can really
help you with your learning. You're developing a kind of
student teacher relationship with me.
Even through these podcasts, you're getting used to my voice,
my way of speaking, and this all helps.
It really helps. Even though it's a podcast,
there's still a real human element there.
So I think these are some of the real drawbacks over using AI and
artificial intelligence for English education.
But many learners of course, need so much more than just
information that AI can kind of provide more than just the
structure and and feedback. They also need the
encouragement, the fun, and that human element and social
learning around it too. So in my opinion, I don't think
that any use of AI tools is going to get rid of teachers in
the long term. I think that a lot of AI
projects and softwares, they will be really useful for
learning, but I think the human element will always stay there.
I'm curious what you think. So if we look into the future
and how AI is going to change, most of what I've talked about
today is the current state of things so far.
So how advanced AI is at the moment, the types of tools that
we have at the moment, But in the future, AI will of course
continue to get more and more advanced.
And this is where it gets a little bit more unclear from my
side. I'm not too sure how this will
continue to affect things in the future.
It might. AI could in theory become even
more natural. It could develop emotional
intelligence, or at least it can pretend to have emotional
intelligence to a level that is very, very good.
And it can of course create even more complex lessons and
personalized learning for students, perhaps more than a
teacher. But even if this happens, there
might still be some problems. And those problems are the exact
same what I've said. So that kind of relationship
element, the human element, particularly with face to face
learning as well and even access to technology.
So if we look at that vocabulary we mentioned before with the
digital divide, there are going to be certain areas, certain
people that are not going to have access to this new
futuristic high tech technology as much as others.
Perhaps with the development of AIA, lot of these systems will
will charge money and become quite expensive because we
already know they use so much energy, so much power, so much
computing power around the world.
It's very difficult for it to remain free and it will have to
be monetized in some way. Particularly in the education
sphere. A lot of these apps and services
charge subscriptions and this can be quite expensive as a
study aid alongside teaching. There are some dangers with AII
think with learning sometimes something which I never
experienced with my language learning because AI has not
really been arrived when I began my learning.
And that is, I think sometimes the challenge to critical
thinking, so critical thinking like I mentioned, is that
ability to think clearly and evaluate information on your
own. With the likes of ChatGPT and
other artificial intelligence systems, it is doing a lot of
critical thinking for us. So we can give it the problem,
we can give it the text, we can give it something that we need
to get the correct answers for, and it will do the work for us.
And this is great for productivity, But how will this
affect the critical thinking skills of a student in the long
term? You know, will it hinder?
So will it slow down and reduce progress?
Perhaps another threat to education in general that people
say with language education is often discussed as translation.
So AI translation. So this ability, it's already
exists with the likes of Google Translate to say something and
have it translated by a computer automatically and then repeated
in that language. And perhaps in the future we
will be able to use devices to automatically translate what the
other person is saying in their language and hear it in our
language. I do think this will probably be
a reality at some point in the future, perhaps not a
widespread, so a common reality in our lifetimes, but it will be
absolutely in the future. But I still don't think that
this is going to stop language learning.
Learning another language allows you to think and understand in
that language. It develops our brain in so many
different ways, and using an AI model or a piece of technology
to do that for us is going to not really replace all of those
other benefits around connection, around culture, and
around understanding that we actually get from learning the
language and even from just that benefit for our brain.
Learning a language is so good for you.
Using your critical thinking skills is so good for you.
And replacing these with a computer, replacing these with
an AI model is not going to to help.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think that AI is fantastic.
I think it's an amazing technology.
And I utilize AI every single day.
I use it with this project to subtitle my videos.
I use it to then produce transcripts for the videos and
to organize and edit texts as well.
But the likes of me speaking to you and the words that I'm
saying, the contents that I'm producing, I want to keep that
natural. So I will never replace my
speech with AI. I will never replace my thoughts
with AI. And to me, that is quite a scary
concept. So I do think that AI has its
place, and I think that it is helping particularly smaller
creators like myself and teachers and individuals to be
able to do so much more with less, which is an amazing time
to be alive. There's so much opportunity, and
I think that with learning English, you have so much
opportunity to use AI with things like vocabulary learning
and with things like reading and writing and grammar, but don't
use it to replace the real human things that you need.
It's just my advice. The likes of speaking,
listening, you need that real input.
There's something about that natural speech, that natural
listening, which I think is going to be very, very hard to
replace with machine learning and with the output that comes
from that. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I do
think that there's so much cultural, so much natural
background behind real speech, real thought, and then the
listening practice that comes from that, that I just, I would
never replace that with something that is artificial.
But of course, time will tell. I'm not going to say I'm right.
I think that time will change a lot with technology in
education. So to summarize my thoughts,
could AI replace teachers? Not completely, at least not
yet. AI is a really powerful tool in
whatever form that it can come in.
I know it's such a generic general phrase, but when it's
used well, it can really support both students and teachers.
But education, as I've said, is much more than just data.
It's much more than productivity.
It's about growth, it's about support, and it's about
relationships. And for now and in the
foreseeable future, in our lifetimes, at least in the next
1020 years, I think that only real people will be able to give
that to the top level essentially.
So if you're learning English, do use some AI tools, you're
probably already using some AI tools as well, but you're also
learning from, you know, a real human voice with emotions,
connection, and you're probably utilizing a lot of a real human
side too. So as things go forward in the
future, be careful how you use AI.
Use it to serve yourself and make sure that you're not just
consuming only AI content. Thank you for listening to this
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