The Role of AI Language Assistants in Dialogic Education for Collective Intelligence

This chapter combines evidence from empirical research studies with arguments drawn from philosophy to explore how we conceptualise the role of AI language assistants like ChatGPTChat generative pre-trained transformer (ChatGPT) in education. We begin with the challenge to existing models of education posed by AI’s ability to pass examinations. We examine again the critique of the idea of AI from Dreyfus and from Searle and the critique of the value of writing from Socrates, to suggest that there may have been much too much focus on the skill of academic writing in education at the expense of the skill of dialogueDialogue, a skill which is more fundamental to intellectual development. We then look at the potential of AI for teaching through dialogue and for teaching dialogue itself in the form of dialogic thinking. We ask what it means for a person to enter into dialogue with a large language model. We conclude that dialogic education mediated by dialogues with large-language models is itself a form of collective intelligenceCollective intelligence which leads us to articulate a vision of individual education as learning how to participate in AI mediated collective intelligence.