'A moving target': Wake school board continues exploring AI policy

The Wake County school board is continuing to explore writing rules around artificial intelligence in schools, with board members hearing their first of three presentations Tuesday about the technology.

The presentation went over what artificial intelligence and machine learning are, how they are used, and what can go wrong. It also included a pitch from Amazon about how artificial intelligence can help schools work more efficiently and about projects the company is working on.

That includes predicting enrollment, processing enrollment paperwork and other services.

For Wake schools, services could document processing or customer service chatbots, said Mary Strain, who heads artificial intelligence and machine learning in Amazon's education wing.

"The best thing to do is ask your staff what they want to stop doing, because what they want to stop doing is often what AI is good at," Strain said. "It's very good at processing paper."

Paperwork burdens can cost large school districts millions of dollars in staff hours, Strain said.

The Wake County Public School System actively encourages schools to teach students and teachers how to use AI to help facilitate learning, but the school board doesn't yet have a policy guiding that. System officials have recommended one to the school board, and board members are still seeking insight on how to craft it.

Many other school boards in central North Carolina already have some kind of policy or references to a commitment to use it and uphold academic integrity standards in its use. For example, numerous school systems specify that use of AI to write essays would be considered plagiarism.

Wake has more informal guidance and guardrials on use of AI so far. That includes restricting access to ChatGPT in preference for Google's Gemini.

A district spokesperson said Gemini, though Wake's long-standing agreement with Google, provides more student data protections than ChatGPT would by preventing student data from being used in the machine learning model. The district doesn't have an agreement with ChatGPT.

The biggest concern Superintendent Robert Taylor hears from teachers is that students can use AI to cheat and aren't really learning. A decade ago, teachers could use online tools to run students' papers through and detect plagiarism. But he said similar AI detection tools don't work as well.

That's a challenge all schools are having to address, even in ones that have policies.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools has had an AI policy in place for two years. Spokesman Andy Jenks said AI can help students learn and enhance their thinking, but it shouldn't replace learning.

"We want to ensure that our students aren't using AI to cheat," Jenks said. "But what that looks like now and in the future, I think, is a moving target."

Wake school board member Christina Gordon, a former teacher, suggested more "flipped" instruction. That's when students' homework reflects a future lesson, rather than reviewing the previous lesson.

Teachers are also concerned about AI hallucinating information and generating false images, Taylor said.

"Those are the things that concern us, [and] will concern our society," Taylor said. "But we want to make sure that we do the work to know and understand the productive uses and how we can set up safeguards to prevent those kinds of things."

For now, Taylor and the school system are giving guidance around student data security.

Namely, that's making sure students and others understand the technology they are using.

"There are a lot of platforms out there and they pull data in different ways," he said. "Where does it pull data from? And we talk about data integrity and information integrity. What does it do with your information when you ask a question?"