Streeter: ChatGPT for Teachers is coming to city schools. This parent is worried.

I will be the first one to admit that I am not always hip to the latest technology of the day, which probably makes me a dinosaur. I’m fine with it. Rawr.

But last week an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” activated my nervous roar and stubby little dino arms. New York Times reporter Natasha Singer spoke with host Terry Gross about how AI is currently being used in schools. Some teachers use AI to generate lesson plans and quizzes, Singer said, and students then use it to do the work.

Essentially this creates “bots talking to bots,” Singer, author of “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle To Remake Public Schools,” told Gross. “Is that what we want education to look like?”

I am a parent of a student enrolled in Baltimore City Public Schools, which has just partnered with OpenAI for a program. I can tell you that it is absolutely not what I want for my child. Or for yours.

Last month, Baltimore City Public Schools announced it was one of 55 districts around the country to be given access to ChatGPT for Teachers, a free program offered by OpenAI. According to the company’s announcement, each district would decide how to use the technology.

City schools’ official AI guidance notes that Generative AI “presents exciting opportunities in education, prompting us to explore its potential benefits, limitations and responsible use,” and that as it becomes a larger part of everyday life, “it’s crucial to equip our staff, students and community with the knowledge and skills to leverage its power effectively while understanding its ethical considerations.”

Deep in my cynical little Luddite heart, it sounds like acknowledging that the Trojan horse is at the door and is on its way inside the gates, so we’d better write a manual and hire some soldiers of our own. But how do we fight back against what is being sold to us as an inevitability, wrapped up in a pretty hopeful bow of progress?

I’ve seen a ChatGPT commercial where an adorable bespectacled grandma is having a cordial conversation with a bot, who she is asking for the correct needles with which to knit a sweater. Do you think that this woman in real life would consult AI and not, say, her 60 years of knitting or her pal Erma down at bingo?

Perhaps I’ve seen the “Terminator” series too many times, and I’m not as ripped as Sarah Connor, but hell yes, I’m wary and defensive about robots that replace too many jobs and industries. I am worried about the way that AI gleans the words and efforts of others to smooth into a new thought. And how much thought is there? You know how people have complained about teachers having to teach to tests? Are we merely training educators and students to think to the beat of the robots?

It’s not like there aren’t rules: In June, Maryland passed State Bill 720, which requires governance for best practices for AI in schools. But what does that mean? According to OpenAI, educators in other places have used ChatGPT for Teachers for lesson planning, communication with parents and preparing report cards. I know it saves time, and I can’t imagine the enormous burden placed on educators to catch all these spinning plates necessary to teach our kids. But I worry about the slippery slope that can crash into a reality where we are completely relying on those bots talking to each other for everything. How long will it be until we lose the beautifully messy creative bits that make learning human?

In an earlier Banner story, Sherry Christian, spokeswoman for Baltimore City Public Schools, said in an emailed statement that the pilot program, “involving a limited number of staff and strict data privacy and security safeguards, will allow us to evaluate the platform’s features and security measures,” gathering information to determine whether it would be implemented more broadly.

Christian declined to comment further for this column on specifics of the district’s implementation until further into the process. But I have so many questions about how this is going to be utilized, what parameters will be set and how they will be enforced.

OpenAI did not return a request for comment.

Nathan Ferrell, a veteran city schools educator currently on release from teaching to work with the Baltimore Teachers Union on issues that include AI, said that the district rejected the union’s Artificial Intelligence Safeguards proposal that would have been in effect beginning in 2027.

“If our employer is unwilling to accept our proposal, we can’t meaningfully agree on what safety looks like for working people regarding AI.”

His co-member, Caroline Schmidt, who teaches English at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, made comments at the most recent school board meeting “to share my serious concerns regarding the use of AI in our classrooms, and a recommendation for how the District should respond.” She suggested that the board “take into consideration a formal pause on the use of generative AI in schools,” as well as the formation of a highly responsive AI Advisory Committee.

“Whether it’s a serious accusation of plagiarism, a mental health incident involving a student or staff member, a grading discrepancy, a flawed administrative form, there will be a serious conflict involving AI that we are not prepared for,” Schmidt said.

You can call me a cavewoman, but I am old enough to have experienced myriad so-called inevitable revolutions I had no choice but to embrace. Sometimes it ends with me having to subscribe to the digital media version of movies and CDs I used to own and now have no way to play. Sometimes it’s watching kids no longer know how to use a paper map and be useless in places where their cellphones don’t have bars.

What is ChatGPT for Teachers good for? I know it’s not good for me as a writer, knowing that AI is not only training on my work and that of others but then using it to aid in my own obsolescence.

I hope that the city schools will, through the use of this platform, create clear parameters for its use. Because this thing is here, and if there aren’t any guardrails, it’s going off a cliff — where the robots are waiting to take over.