Gremlins in the System

Mark Gash throws a spanner into the UK government’s AI dream for schools

So, the UK government recently announced its grand plan to future-proof our kids. A new national programme, “TechFirst,” backed by an initial £187 million, is coming to get our children skilled up in AI. Its “TechYouth” initiative aims to reach one million secondary school students, preparing them for the digital economy.

On paper, it sounds fantastic. In practice? Well, let me tell you about my week.

I went into my daughter’s primary school - admittedly not a secondary school but I’m willing to bet the problem isn’t limited to primary alone - to run a workshop for a class of 8-year-olds. The plan was simple: a fun group session where we’d use generative AI to dream up and create some wild cartoon monsters. I had sites like Freepik and Google Veo ready to go. I was going to be the cool, tech-savvy dad.

Except, I wasn’t. When I got there, the classroom’s smart board was so ancient I couldn’t connect my laptop to it. Plan B: we’ll just gather around my screen. Except, Plan B also failed. The school’s internet creaked along at a miserable 28mbps – for context, I’m pulling at least 240mbps at home. We couldn’t even get the AI websites to load. In the end, we broke out the paper and pencils and created characters the old-school way. And you know what? It was brilliant. I ended up taking photos of the kids’ weird drawings and then AI’d them at home to animate them, even writing a cheeky musical ditty that I had Suno render to accompany the showreel.

This whole experience gave me two big takeaways.

First, kids are creative, no matter the medium. Every single brilliant monster came from their own imaginations. They didn’t need an AI to spark a single idea, which is fantastic. It feels like us adults are outsourcing more and more of that initial spark stage of creativity to AI – we’re so busy or lazy we can’t even be bothered to have an idea, let alone execute it. We have to ensure this laziness doesn’t filter down to our children and lobotomise them from an early age. I’m happy to report that the class I worked with were perfectly capable of coordinating their brains and hands to create fantastic artwork. There’s still hope!

Second, while I’m an old-school (and just old) creative myself, I know the world is changing. I’ve spent the last three years messing with AI so I can use it as a tool to complement my legacy skills. I fully believe that, as much as kids should be learning how to draw, write, and think with their own brain power, they also need to be learning about AI. They need to discover how it fits alongside their human skills, so they aren’t disadvantaged in their careers and, collectively, we don’t get left behind as a nation.

So it’s wonderful to hear our government wants to launch a national AI skills drive. But the reality I saw with my own eyes is that many of our schools’ tech is verging on obsolete. Their internet is only good for sending emails and maybe watching a blurry YouTube video. How can you roll out a high-tech “TechYouth” programme when the basic infrastructure can’t even load a webpage? I once spent a weekend laying a new patio on sand and a muddy excuse for a lawn - 6 months later I had to cover it over with decking. It’s all about the foundations…

Kids don’t need artificial intelligence to create awesome monsters, but our schools desperately need better funding to ensure they can effectively teach the AI skills our government rightly wants them to have. Before we spend millions on ambitious AI programmes, let’s make sure every school has WiFi that works and a smartboard made in this decade. If we can get that balance right, our nation might just stand a chance on the global AI stage.

The government’s TechFirst announcement can be read here: http://bit.ly/4ehL9LW

And if anybody wants to see the end result of the improvised monster workshop, click here: https://youtu.be/Evf7iSt65do