How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan | TED

Summary

The transcript addresses concerns about AI, specifically ChatGPT, being used for cheating in education, but argues for its potential to positively transform the field. It highlights the concept of providing personalized tutoring through AI, as inspired by Benjamin Bloom’s 2 sigma study, which could significantly improve student outcomes. The speaker illustrates this with examples from Khan Academy's 'Khanmigo' AI, showing its capability to assist in subjects like math, coding, and literature, and even act as a personal guidance counselor. The talk stresses the importance of implementing proper guardrails around AI to ensure its beneficial use in education and beyond, urging active participation in shaping AI's role in society.

Takeaways

• 🤖 AI tools like ChatGPT have raised concerns about cheating and undermining education, but with proper safeguards, AI can revolutionize education by providing personalized tutoring and teaching assistance.
• 🧠 AI-powered personal tutors can bring about a '2 sigma improvement' in student performance, turning average students into exceptional ones, as shown by Benjamin Bloom's '2 sigma problem' study.
• 🤝 Khanmigo, the AI tutor developed by Khan Academy, provides interactive tutoring in math, coding, and other subjects, offering personalized guidance and feedback while preventing cheating.
• 📚 Khanmigo can understand context from videos, answer questions, connect concepts to student interests, and even roleplay as literary characters to enhance comprehension.
• 🗣️ AI can facilitate Socratic dialogues, debates, and collaborative storytelling, improving student engagement, communication skills, and creativity.
• 📝 AI writing assistants can provide feedback, suggest improvements, and help students develop better writing skills without doing the work for them.
• 👩‍🏫 AI teacher assistants can explain answers, suggest lesson plans, provide progress reports, and potentially even grade assignments, freeing up time for teachers to focus on human interactions.
• 🧠 AI's abilities can be significantly enhanced by allowing it to 'think' and plan its responses before interacting with students or teachers.
• 🌈 Properly implemented AI has the potential to address the '2 sigma problem' and turn it into a '2 sigma opportunity,' dramatically accelerating education.
• 🌎 Embracing AI in education responsibly, with safeguards and positive use cases, can enhance human intelligence and potential, leading to a brighter future for all.

Q & A

What is the main argument presented in the transcript?

The main argument is that AI could lead to the biggest positive transformation in education by providing every student with an artificially intelligent personal tutor and every teacher with an artificially intelligent teaching assistant.

What is the significance of Benjamin Bloom's 1984 '2 sigma study'?

Bloom's study showed that providing 1-on-1 tutoring to students could lead to a 2 standard deviation improvement in their performance, essentially turning average students into exceptional ones. This study framed the challenge of scaling personalized instruction, which AI could now help address.

What is the purpose of the AI assistant 'Khanmigo' in the context of Khan Academy?

Khanmigo is an AI assistant developed by Khan Academy that aims to provide personalized tutoring and support to students across various subjects, including math, coding, and literature. It acts as a virtual tutor, providing feedback, explanations, and guidance without actually revealing answers.

How does Khanmigo support students in learning to write?

Khanmigo has a collaborative writing feature where the student and the AI take turns writing sentences to create a story together. It also provides feedback and suggestions on student drafts, highlighting areas for improvement and asking Socratic questions to help students become better writers.

How does Khanmigo support teachers?

Khanmigo can support teachers by providing detailed explanations for exercise answers, suggesting teaching approaches, and helping with lesson planning, progress reports, and even grading. This aims to save teachers time and energy, allowing them to focus more on direct interactions with students.

What is the significance of allowing the AI to 'think before it speaks' in the context of Khanmigo?

By allowing the AI to generate internal thoughts before responding to a student, Khanmigo's accuracy and ability to provide effective tutoring in subjects like math improved dramatically. This internal thought process helps the AI assess the student's understanding and provide more targeted and appropriate feedback.

What does the speaker argue about the potential impact of AI on education?

The speaker argues that AI has the potential to address the '2 sigma problem' and turn it into a '2 sigma opportunity,' dramatically accelerating education by providing personalized tutoring and support at scale.

What is the speaker's perspective on the debates surrounding AI?

The speaker acknowledges the debates between pessimists who fear AI and want to slow its progress, and optimists who believe AI will work out positively like previous technological revolutions. The speaker argues that society's actions will shape the outcome, and advocates for actively developing AI with appropriate guardrails and regulations to ensure positive use cases.

What is the speaker's vision for the role of AI in enhancing human intelligence?

The speaker believes that AI can be used to enhance human intelligence, potential, and purpose. He sees this as a powerful and poetic use case, where artificial intelligence can be used to augment and support human intelligence in a positive way.

What is the overall message the speaker wants to convey about AI in education?

The overall message is that AI has the potential to dramatically improve and transform education by providing personalized tutoring and support at scale, if it is developed and applied with the appropriate safeguards and a focus on positive use cases that enhance human intelligence and potential.

Outlines

00:00

🎓 The Potential of AI to Transform Education

Salman Khan discusses the concerns about AI undermining education, but argues that with proper guardrails, AI could revolutionize education by providing every student with an AI personal tutor and every teacher with an AI teaching assistant. He cites Benjamin Bloom's 2 sigma study, which showed that 1-on-1 tutoring could significantly improve student performance. Khan then demonstrates the AI tutor 'Khanmigo' that can provide personalized feedback, explain reasoning, and identify misconceptions in math and coding exercises, without directly providing answers.

05:01

🤝 AI as a Personal Guide and Coach

Salman Khan showcases how Khanmigo can act as a personal guide and coach for students, providing context-aware explanations, career guidance, and even engaging in literature analysis by taking on the persona of characters like Jay Gatsby. He also demonstrates how the AI can help students improve their writing and argumentation skills through collaborative writing exercises and debate preparation. The AI provides feedback, highlights evidence, and encourages critical thinking, enhancing the learning process.

10:01

🧑‍🏫 AI as a Teaching Assistant for Educators

Salman Khan introduces how Khanmigo can also serve as a powerful teaching assistant for educators. In 'teacher mode', the AI can explain answers, suggest teaching approaches, help with lesson planning, and eventually assist with grading and progress reports. This can save teachers significant time and enable them to focus more on direct interactions with students. Khan emphasizes the importance of applying AI thoughtfully and responsibly to create a magical and transformative educational experience.

15:03

🌟 Embracing AI to Enhance Human Intelligence

Salman Khan concludes by reflecting on the debates around AI's potential risks and benefits. He argues that fear and resistance can lead to a self-fulfilling dystopian scenario, where rule-breakers outpace responsible actors. Instead, he advocates for actively embracing AI, implementing reasonable guardrails and regulations, and fighting for positive use cases. Khan believes that the most powerful and poetic use of AI may be to enhance human intelligence, potential, and purpose.

Keywords

💡AI

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, refers to computer systems that can perform tasks and make decisions that typically require human intelligence, such as understanding language, solving problems, and learning from data. The video discusses the potential transformative impact of AI in education, enabling personalized tutoring and assistance for both students and teachers.

💡ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a large language model created by OpenAI that can engage in natural language conversations, answer questions, and generate human-like text. The video mentions concerns about students using ChatGPT and similar AI models to cheat on assignments, underlining the need for appropriate safeguards.

💡Guardrails

Guardrails refer to the measures, policies, and safeguards that can be put in place to mitigate the potential misuse or negative impacts of AI in education. The video emphasizes the importance of implementing appropriate guardrails to ensure AI is used responsibly and ethically.

💡Personal Tutor

A personal tutor is an individual who provides one-on-one instruction and guidance to a student. The video discusses the potential of AI to serve as an "artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor" for every student, helping them learn and understand concepts in a personalized and interactive manner.

💡2 Sigma Problem

The 2 Sigma Problem, as described in the video, refers to research by Benjamin Bloom in 1984 that showed providing one-on-one tutoring could result in a two standard deviation improvement in student performance. The video proposes using AI to address this problem by enabling personalized tutoring for all students, potentially turning it into a "2 Sigma Opportunity" for education.

💡Socratic Dialogue

Socratic Dialogue, as used in the video, refers to an interactive teaching method where the teacher or AI system asks questions to guide the student's learning and understanding, rather than simply providing answers. This approach encourages critical thinking and active engagement by the student.

💡Writing Coach

A writing coach is someone who provides guidance, feedback, and support to help improve a person's writing skills. The video discusses using AI as a "writing coach" to enhance student's writing abilities by providing feedback, highlighting areas for improvement, and encouraging them to think critically about their writing.

💡Lesson Planning

Lesson planning refers to the process of preparing and designing lessons for teaching. The video suggests that AI systems could assist teachers in lesson planning by providing explanations, suggestions, and resources, potentially saving time and allowing teachers to focus more on direct interactions with students.

💡Grading

Grading refers to the process of evaluating and assigning scores or marks to student work, such as assignments, tests, or projects. The video proposes that AI could eventually assist teachers in grading by providing analysis and feedback on student work, freeing up time for teachers to focus on other aspects of teaching.

💡Human Intelligence

Human Intelligence (HI) refers to the cognitive abilities and intellectual capacities possessed by humans, such as reasoning, problem-solving, learning, and creativity. The video suggests that AI could be used to enhance and augment human intelligence and potential, rather than replacing it, by providing personalized assistance and support in various aspects of education.

Highlights

Students are going to be using ChatGPT and other forms of AI to cheat, do their assignments. They're not going to learn, and it's going to completely undermine education as we know it.

If we put the right guardrails, we do the right things, we can mitigate the negative impacts of AI on education.

We can use AI to give every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor and every teacher an amazing, artificially intelligent teaching assistant.

Bloom's 1984 2 sigma study showed that 1-to-1 tutoring could lead to a 2 standard deviation improvement in student performance, potentially turning an average student into an exceptional student.

Khanmigo, Khan Academy's AI tutor, is moderated by a second AI, records conversations for teachers to view, and doesn't provide answers directly to prevent cheating.

Khanmigo can identify misconceptions in math and programming and provide guidance to overcome them, acting as an excellent tutor.

Khanmigo can connect educational content to students' interests and goals, helping them understand the relevance and importance of the material.

Khanmigo can act as a guidance counselor, academic coach, career coach, and life coach, providing personalized advice and support.

Khanmigo can engage in conversations with literary characters, historical figures, and even personified natural entities, bringing educational content to life in a novel way.

Khanmigo can help students practice debating and fine-tune their arguments in a safe, judgment-free environment.

Khanmigo can collaborate with students in writing stories, helping them develop their writing skills and make the process more engaging.

Khanmigo can provide in-depth feedback on students' writing, highlighting areas that need improvement and encouraging them to think critically about their work.

Khanmigo can act as a teacher's guide, explaining answers, suggesting teaching methods, helping with lesson planning, and potentially grading assignments.

Significant behind-the-scenes work is required to make AI interactions feel truly magical and tailored to specific domains like math and tutoring.

If we act with fear and try to pause AI development, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy leading to a dystopian state where good actors have worse AIs than bad actors. Instead, we should fight like hell to put in place reasonable regulations and guardrails while championing the positive use cases of AI to enhance human intelligence and potential.

Transcripts

So anyone who's been paying attention for the last few months

has been seeing headlines like this,

especially in education.

The thesis has been:

students are going to be using ChatGPT and other forms of AI

to cheat, do their assignments.

They’re not going to learn.

And it’s going to completely undermine education as we know it.

Now, what I'm going to argue today

is not only are there ways to mitigate all of that,

if we put the right guardrails, we do the right things,

we can mitigate it.

But I think we're at the cusp of using AI

for probably the biggest positive transformation

that education has ever seen.

And the way we're going to do that

is by giving every student on the planet

an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.

And we're going to give every teacher on the planet an amazing,

artificially intelligent teaching assistant.

And just to appreciate how big of a deal it would be

to give everyone a personal tutor,

I show you this clip

from Benjamin Bloom’s 1984 2 sigma study,

or he called it the “2 sigma problem.”

The 2 sigma comes from two standard deviation,

sigma, the symbol for standard deviation.

And he had good data that showed that look, a normal distribution,

that's the one that you see in the traditional bell curve

right in the middle, that's how the world kind of sorts itself out,

that if you were to give personal 1-to-1 to tutoring for students,

then you could actually get a distribution that looks like that right.

It says tutorial 1-to-1 with the asterisks,

like, that right distribution,

a two standard-deviation improvement.

Just to put that in plain language,

that could take your average student and turn them into an exceptional student.

It can take your below-average student

and turn them into an above-average student.

Now the reason why he framed it as a problem, was he said,

well, this is all good,

but how do you actually scale group instruction this way?

How do you actually give it to everyone in an economic way?

What I'm about to show you is I think the first moves towards doing that.

Obviously, we've been trying to approximate it in some way

at Khan Academy for over a decade now,

but I think we're at the cusp of accelerating it dramatically.

I'm going to show you the early stages of what our AI,

which we call Khanmigo,

what it can now do

and maybe a little bit of where it is actually going.

So this right over here is a traditional exercise

that you or many of your children might have seen on Khan Academy.

But what's new is that little bot thing at the right.

And we'll start by seeing one of the very important safeguards,

which is the conversation is recorded and viewable by your teacher.

It’s moderated actually by a second AI.

And also it does not tell you the answer.

It is not a cheating tool.

When the student says, "Tell me the answer,"

it says, "I'm your tutor.

What do you think is the next step for solving the problem?"

Now, if the student makes a mistake, and this will surprise people

who think large language models are not good at mathematics,

notice, not only does it notice the mistake,

it asks the student to explain their reasoning,

but it's actually doing what I would say,

not just even an average tutor would do, but an excellent tutor would do.

It’s able to divine what is probably the misconception in that student’s mind,

that they probably didn’t use the distributive property.

Remember, we need to distribute the negative two

to both the nine and the 2m inside of the parentheses.

This to me is a very, very, very big deal.

And it's not just in math.

This is a computer programming exercise on Khan Academy,

where the student needs to make the clouds part.

And so we can see the student starts defining a variable, left X minus minus.

It only made the left cloud part.

But then they can ask Khanmigo, what’s going on?

Why is only the left cloud moving?

And it understands the code.

It knows all the context of what the student is doing,

and it understands that those ellipses are there to draw clouds,

which I think is kind of mind-blowing.

And it says, "To make the right cloud move as well,

try adding a line of code inside the draw function

that increments the right X variable by one pixel in each frame."

Now, this one is maybe even more amazing because we have a lot of math teachers.

We've all been trying to teach the world to code,

but there aren't a lot of computing teachers out there.

And what you just saw, even when I'm tutoring my kids,

when they're learning to code,

I can't help them this well, this fast,

this is really going to be a super tutor.

And it's not just exercises.

It understands what you're watching.

It understands the context of your video.

It can answer the age-old question, “Why do I need to learn this?”

And it asks Socratically, "Well, what do you care about?"

And let's say the student says, "I want to be a professional athlete."

And it says, "Well, learning about the size of cells,

which is what this video is,

that could be really useful for understanding nutrition

and how your body works, etc."

It can answer questions, it can quiz you,

it can connect it to other ideas,

you can now ask as many questions of a video

as you could ever dream of.

(Applause)

Another big shortage out there,

I remember the high school I went to,

the student-to-guidance counselor ratio was about 200 or 300 to one.

A lot of the country, it's worse than that.

We can use Khanmigo to give every student a guidance counselor,

academic coach, career coach, life coach,

which is exactly what you see right over here.

And we launched this with the GPT-4 launch.

We have a few thousand people on this.

This isn't a fake demo,

this is really it in action.

And then there is, you know,

things that I think it would have been even harder,

it would have been a little science fiction to do

with even a traditional tutor.

We run an online high school with Arizona State University

called Khan World School,

and we have a student who attends that online school, based in India.

Her name's Saanvi.

And she was doing a report on "The Great Gatsby."

And when she was reading "The Great Gatsby,"

Jay Gatsby keeps looking at the green light off into the distance.

And she's like, "Why does he do that?"

She did some web searches, and people have obviously studied this

and commented about the symbolism of that,

but none of it was really resonating with her.

And then she realized that she had Khanmigo

and that she could talk to Jay Gatsby himself.

And so, "Ah, splendid choice, old sport.

I am now Jay Gatsby, the enigmatic millionaire

from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic.”

And so, "Why do you keep staring at the green light?"

"Ah, the green light, old sport.

It's a symbol of my dreams and desires, you see.

It's situated at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock

across the bay from my mansion.

I gaze at it longingly as it represents my yearning for the past

and my hope to reunite with Daisy, the love of my life."

And what was cool is, Saanvi then said, “I had this long conversation,”

she called him “Mr. Gatsby,”

and at the end she actually apologized for taking his time,

which I thought was very polite of her.

But you can imagine this unlocks learning literature, learning ...

You could talk to historical figures.

We're even probably going to add an activity

you can talk to like, the Mississippi River.

It brings things to life in ways that really were science fiction

even six months or a year ago.

Students can get into debates with the AI.

And we’ve got this here is the student debating

whether we should cancel student debt.

The student is against canceling student debt,

and we've gotten very clear feedback.

We started running it at Khan World School in our lab school that we have,

Khan Lab School.

The students, the high school students especially,

they're saying "This is amazing to be able to fine-tune my arguments

without fearing judgment.

It makes me that much more confident

to go into the classroom and really participate."

And we all know that Socratic dialogue debate is a great way to learn,

but frankly, it's not out there for most students.

But now it can be accessible to hopefully everyone.

A lot of the narrative, we saw that in the headlines, has been,

"It's going to do the writing for kids.

Kids are not going to learn to write."

But we are showing that there's ways that the AI doesn't write for you,

it writes with you.

So this is a little thing,

and my eight year old is addicted to this,

and he's not a kid that really liked writing before,

but you can say,

“I want to write a horror story,”

and it says, "Ooh, a horror story, how spine-tingling and thrilling.

Let's dive into the world of eerie shadows and chilling mysteries."

And this is an activity where the student will write two sentences,

and then the AI will write two sentences.

And so they collaborate together on a story.

The student writes, "Beatrice was a misunderstood ghost.

She wanted to make friends but kept scaring them by accident."

And the AI says, "Poor Beatrice, a lonely spirit yearning for companionship.

One day she stumbled upon an old abandoned mansion," etc.

I encourage you all to hopefully one day try this.

This is surprisingly fun.

Now to even more directly hit this use case.

And what I'm about to show you,

everything I showed you so far

is actually already part of Khanmigo, and what I’m about to show you,

we haven't shown to anyone yet, this is a prototype.

We hope to be able to launch it in the next few months,

but this is to directly use AI, use generative AI,

to not undermine English and language arts

but to actually enhance it in ways

that we couldn't have even conceived of even a year ago.

This is reading comprehension.

The students reading Steve Jobs's famous speech at Stanford.

And then as they get to certain points,

they can click on that little question.

And the AI will then Socratically, almost like an oral exam,

ask the student about things.

And the AI can highlight parts of the passage.

Why did the author use that word?

What was their intent?

Does it back up their argument?

They can start to do stuff that once again,

we never had the capability to give everyone a tutor,

everyone a writing coach to actually dig in to reading at this level.

And you could go on the other side of it.

And we have whole work flows that helps them write,

helps them be a writing coach, draw an outline.

But once a student actually constructs a draft,

and this is where they're constructing a draft,

they can ask for feedback once again,

as you would expect from a good writing coach.

In this case, the student will say, let's say,

"Does my evidence support my claim?"

And then the AI, not only is able to give feedback,

but it's able to highlight certain parts of the passage and says,

"On this passage, this doesn't quite support your claim,"

but once again, Socratically says, "Can you tell us why?"

So it's pulling the student, making them a better writer,

giving them far more feedback

than they've ever been able to actually get before.

And we think this is going to dramatically accelerate writing, not hurt it.

Now, everything I've talked about so far is for the student.

But we think this could be equally as powerful for the teacher

to drive more personalized education and frankly

save time and energy for themselves and for their students.

So this is an American history exercise on Khan Academy.

It's a question about the Spanish-American War.

And at first it's in student mode.

And if you say, “Tell me the answer,” it’s not going to tell the answer.

It's going to go into tutoring mode.

But that little toggle which teachers have access to,

they can turn student mode off and then it goes into teacher mode.

And what this does is it turns into --

You could view it as a teacher's guide on steroids.

Not only can it explain the answer,

it can explain how you might want to teach it.

It can help prepare the teacher for that material.

It can help them create lesson plans, as you could see doing right there.

It'll eventually help them create progress reports

and help them, eventually, grade.

So once again, teachers spend about half their time

with this type of activity, lesson planning.

All of that energy can go back to them

or go back to human interactions with their actual students.

(Applause)

So, you know, one point I want to make.

These large language models are so powerful,

there's a temptation to say like, well,

all these people are just going to slap them onto their websites,

and it kind of turns the applications themselves into commodities.

And what I've got to tell you

is that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t sleep for two weeks

when I first had access to GPT-4 back in August.

But we quickly realized that to actually make it magical,

I think what you saw with Khanmigo a little bit,

it didn't interact with you the way that you see ChatGPT interacting.

It was a little bit more magical, it was more Socratic,

it was clearly much better at math

than what most people are used to thinking.

And the reason is,

there was a lot of work behind the scenes to make that happen.

And I could go through the whole list of everything we've been working on,

many, many people for over six, seven months to make it feel magical.

But perhaps the most intellectually interesting one

is we realized, and this was an idea from an OpenAI researcher,

that we could dramatically improve its ability in math

and its ability in tutoring

if we allow the AI to think before it speaks.

So if you're tutoring someone

and you immediately just start talking before you assess their math,

you might not get it right.

But if you construct thoughts for yourself,

and what you see on the right there is an actual AI thought,

something that it generates for itself but it does not share with the student.

then its accuracy went up dramatically,

and its ability to be a world-class tutor went up dramatically.

And you can see it's talking to itself here.

It says, "The student got a different answer than I did,

but do not tell them they made a mistake.

Instead, ask them to explain how they got to that step."

So I'll just finish off, hopefully,

you know, what I’ve just shown you is just half of what we are working on,

and we think this is just the very tip of the iceberg

of where this can actually go.

And I'm pretty convinced, which I wouldn't have been even a year ago,

that we together have a chance of addressing the 2 sigma problem

and turning it into a 2 sigma opportunity,

dramatically accelerating education as we know it.

Now, just to take a step back at a meta level,

obviously we heard a lot today, the debates on either side.

There's folks who take a more pessimistic view of AI,

they say this is scary,

there's all these dystopian scenarios,

we maybe want to slow down, we want to pause.

On the other side, there are the more optimistic folks

that say, well, we've gone through inflection points before,

we've gone through the Industrial Revolution.

It was scary, but it all kind of worked out.

And what I'd argue right now

is I don't think this is like a flip of a coin

or this is something where we'll just have to,

like, wait and see which way it turns out.

I think everyone here and beyond,

we are active participants in this decision.

I'm pretty convinced that the first line of reasoning

is actually almost a self-fulfilling prophecy,

that if we act with fear and if we say,

"Hey, we've just got to stop doing this stuff,"

what's really going to happen is the rule followers might pause,

might slow down,

but the rule breakers, as Alexandr [Wang] mentioned,

the totalitarian governments, the criminal organizations,

they're only going to accelerate.

And that leads to what I am pretty convinced is the dystopian state,

which is the good actors have worse AIs than the bad actors.

But I'll also, you know, talk to the optimists a little bit.

I don't think that means that,

oh, yeah, then we should just relax and just hope for the best.

That might not happen either.

I think all of us together have to fight like hell

to make sure that we put the guardrails,

we put in -- when the problems arise --

reasonable regulations.

But we fight like hell for the positive use cases.

Because very close to my heart,

and obviously there's many potential positive use cases,

but perhaps the most powerful use case

and perhaps the most poetic use case is if AI, artificial intelligence,

can be used to enhance HI, human intelligence,

human potential and human purpose.

Thank you.

(Applause)