By Malcolm Strachan

THERE is a line made famous by legendary musician John Lennon, who sang: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

As I write this article, the would-be Tropical Storm Imelda is starting to pound the windows with rain, and The Bahamas has woken up to the shocking news that Environment Minister Vaughn Miller has died. This article is about neither of those matters.

It is too soon to write about what this storm will or will not do – though there are matters that are surprising such as the lateness of the briefings about the storm and the prime minister speaking in New York about the danger of the storms rather than hopping on a plane sooner to come home and deal with them. With luck, those will be mere footnotes if the storm passes without serious damage or danger to life and limb.

It is also too soon to write about what happens next after the passing of Vaughn Miller. It will of course trigger a bye-election, and with a general election not far away, that will be a bellwether for the direction of the voters, but first people must be allowed to mourn a minister, a colleague, a friend, a family member.

Instead, this week, the subject is artificial intelligence – and particularly its use by students.

It is hard to get away from artificial intelligence these days. I open up my writing software and it offers to write a story for me – I assure you these words are all mine, no machine lent a hand here. I get an email and there are automated suggestions for replies, all of them quite useless. I contact a support line for help and get an AI helper responding up to the point that it can’t help and passes me on to a real person.

And, in particular for this column, I sometimes hear one of my children asking an AI helper for the answers to some homework.

The president of the Bahamas Union of Teachers, Belinda Wilson, talked about the subject last week.

The use of AI by students is a big topic. Around the world, schools have been grappling with the issue – a quick search will find stories in the UK newspapers, in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post. Pick a country, its leading newspapers will have written about it.

The challenge is obvious – teachers need to make sure that students are really learning and not just asking a machine to turn something in that will get them a good mark. The point of giving a student math homework, for example, is to be able to assess that the student can do the sums, get the right answers. If all the student does is go and ask Siri or Alexa or ChatGPT for the answers, there is no point. It is not about the answers, it is about the learning.

Dealing with that is a discussion that teachers should be involved in at all levels – including having discussions with parents. For other parents, it will probably come as no surprise that I have had no such communications from school – and I would imagine it is the same for almost everyone else.

It seems it is the same case for the teachers too – with Mrs Wilson saying there has been nothing from the government on the issue either.

“The Ministry of Education or no official from the Ministry of Education has ever even mentioned AI to me as the union leader, and teachers have not said that they have had any communication or interaction about AI,” she said. “We have not yet, as a union or as a government or as a Ministry of Education, even mentioned artificial intelligence and as stakeholders, I contend that we must start the conversation of artificial intelligence sooner than later.”

Read this bit again: “We have not yet… even mentioned artificial intelligence.”

This is a debate going on around the world and we have not even sat down to talk about it yet.

Some teachers are certainly already noticing the use of AI in action. Mrs Wilson said that some teachers are already flagging homework assignments that look like they have been done using AI software such as ChatGPT.

How can the teachers tell? Well, AI has its own way of writing that is often very different from the way students write. It can often have more formal structures, use vocabulary that is less common, and so on.

Good teachers know their students, they know the level of work that they normally submit. So when something comes in that looks different from the usual, they suspect something is up.

Mrs Wilson said: ““They also would note that the vocabulary that the student is using is not the normal, ordinary vocabulary that the students usually use in the classroom or when they taught them in previous years, the structure of their essay or their writings. It’s just they know that it’s not the way that they would have taught them in the class.”

In October last year, the Education Director, Dominique McCartney-Russell had said officials were drafting a policy on AI use in schools. By the sound of things, it has not gone very far if no one has talked to teachers about it.

AI is not going away – and frankly it is going to get harder and harder to detect it as it adapts to other writing styles. Using AI is going to be a life skill – students are going to find it to be something they might use throughout their future careers, so learning how to use it is important too. But it must not get in the way of the groundwork of learning.

If I am an employer, and I hire someone who has passed their math and English exams with, say, B grades, I want to know they have the skills to back that up, and not just that they got an AI to do the work for them.

The use of AI is widespread – it would be stupid to pretend otherwise. Two professors at the University of York, Prof Leo McCann and Prof Simon Sweeney, got it spot on in an article in the UK Guardian when they said: “Claims that AI helps preparation or research is simply cover for students taking shortcuts that do not develop their learning skills… generative AI results in generic, dull and often factually incorrect output.”

All of this perhaps leads to a bigger question – what is education about anyway? AI is a tool, but the worry is that it gets in the way of learning itself. That might not be the only way we need to consider how our students learn to learn – but it is certainly something we should be talking about.