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

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.