AI is rapidly gaining popularity among students and teachers

While many polls show that Americans as a whole remain cautious about artificial intelligence, adoption in education is growing rapidly among teachers and students.

According to a new poll conducted in May by Impact Research for the Walton Family Foundation in collaboration with the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute's AI Lab, in just over a year, the percentage of teachers saying they were familiar with ChatGPT (Microsoft-backed OpenAI's groundbreaking generative AI chatbot that will next be featured on Apple iPhones) has risen from 55% to 79%, and among K-12 students, it has risen from 37% to 75%.

We saw a similar spike in actual usage, with 46% of teachers and 48% of students using ChatGPT at least once a week, a 27 percentage point increase in student usage over last year.

Perhaps most notably, student reviews have been largely positive: 70% of K-12 students have a favorable view of AI chatbots; that number rises to 75% for undergraduates; and 68% of parents have a favorable view of AI chatbots.

“The data is much more positive than we expected,” said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an AI expert and author who examined the poll data.

The poll data is consistent with the experience of Khan Academy and its founder Sal Khan. Over the past year, Khan has been working with the Newark, New Jersey, school district and others to test the use of Khanmigo, a ChatGPT customized for education. Khan recently told CNBC that the company will expand the reach of its AI tool from 65,000 students to 1 million in the next year. The company also recently announced that Microsoft will fund and make its AI available for free to teachers across the US. (School districts pay a per-student fee, which these days ranges from $35 per user, but Khan said that as the technology scales, it could bring this price down to the $10-20 range.)

“In the past in technology and education, this has been a 'nice to have' thing, but I think this is a 'must have' for a lot of teachers,” Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, said recently on CNBC's “Squawk Box.”

While Khan Academy is best known for its educational videos, its interactive exercise platform was one of the platforms that OpenAI CEOs Sam Altman and Greg Brockman looked at early on when they were looking for a pilot partner for ChatGPT, which offers a socially positive use case.

Adoption rates in education are higher than those seen in the world of work today, with students who are more motivated to get help “pulling teachers along with them,” Mollick said.

In fact, teachers were the only demographic surveyed to experience a decline in favorability compared to last year, but the majority (59%) still have a positive view of AI chatbots.

While older teachers and parents (those over 45) tend to be less confident that they can use AI effectively, Khan said one of the reasons Microsoft and his nonprofit want to give every educator in the U.S. access to AI is because of the time it can save teachers.

Khan recently told CNBC that in the past, teachers have often been told, “If only you'd learned just one more thing,” which puts a strain on already-busy educators. “Teachers are already stretched thin, and with teacher tools in particular, it's one more thing they have to learn,” he said. But in studies Khan has done with school districts so far, it has saved teachers five to 10 hours of their time per week. “This is the first time in technology where we can say to teachers, 'Here's one less thing you have to do. Yes, it's going to require a little bit of learning, but it's going to save you time.'”

Only 25% of teachers surveyed said they have received training on AI chatbots, and nearly a third (32%) said a lack of training and professional development is the main reason they are not using AI.Teachers said they use AI for lesson idea generation (37%), preparing lesson plans and materials (32%), student worksheets or examples (32%), and creating quizzes or tests (31%).

Mollick said he's optimistic about AI in education in the long term, but in the short term, he said these results are relatively high compared to past polls about the adoption of new technology. “I was a little surprised that the numbers turned out as well as they did, and that there was such positive sentiment across all groups,” he said. “AI isn't universally popular, but we're not seeing the strong negative sentiment that we normally see,” he said.

It's still early days. In a recent interview with CNBC, Khan said the first guide is not to let technology take precedence over use cases. He said that in the past 15 years, districts have “been able to accelerate outcomes pretty dramatically because of technology,” but “we also see a lot of cases where they've bought iPads or laptops and they've just let them gather dust.”

The new data also shows greater equity in the use of AI in education. Underrepresented groups are more likely to adopt AI in education, including teachers and parents using AI to help their children. Black and Hispanic K-12 students and college students were more likely to use AI in school. Among parents, 47% of those surveyed want schools to increase their use of AI chatbots, compared to 36% who want them to decrease their use. Parental support for the use of AI in education is higher among Black (57%) and Hispanic (55%) parents.

Mollick said it's too early to conclusively compile data on economics and equity, and said private school students are the most likely to use AI both personally and at school. But he added it's worth digging deeper into the data to consider whether AI can fill existing gaps in the school system. “Now people have access to AI tutors, so they don't have to pay for a tutor,” he said.

Khan said AI for the classroom is an extension of personalization that fits with his organization's founding story, when he was privately tutoring his cousin, Nadia. “AI, coupled with everything else we've been doing for years, can bring us ever closer to the ideal of being able to mimic what a good tutor would do,” he recently told CNBC. “In my opinion, this passes the Turing test,” Khan said, referring to famed British mathematician and AI pioneer Alan Turing's goal that computer intelligence would be on par with human intelligence, and humans would be unable to distinguish between computer and human intelligence. “This is indistinguishable from when I sent a text message to Nadia in 2004.”

AI and Fraud

The results raise many questions for educators and parents.

Mollick said the value of classroom lectures is unclear if students can get all their information from AI, but that while the AI's accuracy compared to teachers has been generally good, open questions remain. “We need to be careful about jumping in all together,” he said.

About 20% of teachers surveyed said ChatGPT has a negative impact, up from 7% last year.

While online cheating is nothing new, you can't talk about AI in education without also considering its use for cheating. “Students have a lot of incentive to cheat because they have too much to do and not enough time to get it done,” Mollick said. Historically, homework has been proven to improve student grades, but since the rise of online cheating, that relationship has worsened, and AI could further diminish the value of homework.

K-12 students surveyed said they were most likely to have used AI chatbots to help them write essays or other assignments (56%), followed by studying for tests or quizzes (52%).

Khan recently told CNBC that the company's AI tutoring system essentially keeps students within its walls while they write, say, an essay, and the AI ​​can identify whether progress on an assignment is due to student effort and alert teachers to any signs of cheating.

Mollick said the new monitoring system would bring its own problems and create new ways for students to find ways around the checks.