Microsoft and OpenAI announced on Tuesday that they are helping to launch an AI training center for members of the second-largest teachers’ union in the US.
The National Academy for AI Instruction will open later this year in New York City and aims initially to equip kindergarten up to 12th grade instructors in the American Federation of Teachers with tools and training for integrating AI into classrooms.
“Teachers are facing huge challenges, which include navigating AI wisely, ethically, and safely,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said during a press conference on Tuesday. “When we saw ChatGPT in November 2022, we knew it would fundamentally change our world. The question was whether we would be chasing it or we would try to harness it.” Anthropic, which develops the Claude chatbot, also recently became a collaborator on what the union described as a first-of-its-kind $23 million initiative funded by the tech companies to bring free training to teachers.
WIRED earlier reported on the effort, citing details that were inadvertently published early on YouTube.
Schools have struggled over the past few years to keep pace with students’ adoption of AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini. While highly capable at helping write papers and solving some math problems, the technologies can also confidently make costly errors. And they have left parents, educators, and employers concerned about whether chatbots rob students of the opportunity to develop essential skills on their own.
Some school districts have deployed new tools to catch AI-assisted cheating, and teachers have begun rolling out lessons about what they view as responsible use of generative AI. Educators have been using AI to help with the time-consuming work of developing teaching plans and materials, and they also tout how it has introduced greater interactivity and creativity in the classroom.
Weingarten, the union president, has said that educators must have a seat at the table in how AI is integrated into their profession. The new academy could help teachers better understand fast-changing AI technologies and evolve their curriculum to prepare students for a world in which the tools are core to many jobs.
Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said on Tuesday that the spread of AI and a resulting increase in productivity were inevitable. “Can we ensure those productivity gains are democratized?” he said. “There is no better place to begin that work than the classroom.”
But the program is likely to draw rebuke from some union members concerned about the commercial incentives of tech giants shaping what happens in US classrooms. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have competed for years to get their tools into schools in hopes of turning children into lifelong users. (Microsoft and OpenAI have also increasingly become competitors, despite a once-close relationship.)
Just last week, several professors in the Netherlands published an open letter calling for local universities to reconsider financial relationships with AI companies and ban AI use in the classroom. All-out bans appear unlikely amid the growing usage of generative AI chatbots. So AI companies, employers, and labor unions may be left to try to find some common ground.
