Free AI training comes to California colleges — but at what cost?

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As artificial intelligence replaces entry-level jobs, California’s universities and community colleges are offering a glimmer of hope for students: free AI training that will teach them to master the new technology. 

“You’re seeing in certain coding spaces significant declines in hiring for obvious reasons,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday during a press conference from the seventh floor of Google’s San Francisco office.

Flanked by leadership from California’s higher education systems, he called attention to the recent layoffs at Microsoft, at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and at Salesforce Tower, just a few blocks away, home to the tech company that is still the city’s largest private employer.

Now, some of those companies — including Google and Microsoft — will offer a suite of AI resources for free to California schools and universities. In return, the companies could gain access to millions of new users.

The state’s community colleges and its California State University campuses are “the backbone of our workforce and economic development,” Newsom said, just before education leaders and tech executives signed agreements on AI.

The new deals are the latest developments in a frenzy that began in November 2022, when OpenAI publicly released the free artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, forcing schools to adapt.

The Los Angeles Unified School District implemented an AI chatbot last year, only to cancel it three months later without disclosing why. San Diego Unified teachers started using AI software that suggested what grades to give students, CalMatters reported. Some of the district’s board members were unaware that the district had purchased the software. 

Last month, the company that oversees Canvas, a learning management system popular in California schools and universities, said it would add “interactive conversations in a ChatGPT-like environment” into its software. 

To combat potential AI-related cheating, many K-12 and college districts are using a new feature from the software company Turnitin to detect plagiarism, but a CalMatters investigation found that the software accused students who did real work instead.

Mixed Signals?

These deals are sending mixed signals, said Stephanie Goldman, the president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. “Districts were already spending lots of money on AI detection software. What do you do when it’s built into the software they’re using?”

Don Daves-Rougeaux, a senior adviser for the community college system, acknowledged the potential contradiction but said it’s part of a broader effort to keep up with the rapid pace of changes in AI. He said the community college system will frequently reevaluate the use of Turnitin along with all other AI tools. 

California’s community college system is responsible for the bulk of job training in the state, though it receives the least funding from the state per student. 

“Oftentimes when we are having these conversations, we are looked at as a smaller system,” said Daves-Rougeaux. The state’s 116 community colleges collectively educate roughly 2.1 million students.

In the deals announced Thursday, the community college system will partner with Google, Microsoft, Adobe and IBM to roll out additional AI training for teachers. Daves-Rougeaux said the system has also signed deals that will allow students to use exclusive versions of Google’s counterpart to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI research tool, Notebook LLM. Daves-Rougeaux said these tools will save community colleges “hundreds of millions of dollars,” though he could not provide an exact figure. 

“It’s a tough situation for faculty,” said Goldman. “AI is super important but it has come up time and time again: How do you use AI in the classroom while still ensuring that students, who are still developing critical thinking skills, aren’t just using it as a crutch?”

One concern is that faculty could lose control over how AI is used in their classrooms, she added.

The K-12 system and Cal State University system are forming their own tech deals. Amy Bentley-Smith, a spokesperson for the Cal State system, said it is working on its own AI programs with Google, Microsoft, Adobe and IBM as well as Amazon Web Services, Intel, LinkedIn, Open AI and others. 

Angela Musallam, a spokesperson for the state government operations agency, said California high schools are part of the deal with Adobe, which aims to promote “AI literacy,” the idea that students and teachers should have basic skills to detect and use artificial intelligence.

Much like the community college system, which is governed by local districts, Musallam said individual K-12 districts would need to approve any deal. 

Will Deals Make a Difference to Students, Teachers?

Experts say it’s too early to tell how effective AI training will actually be.

Justin Reich, an associate professor at MIT, said a similar frenzy took place 20 years ago when teachers tried to teach computer literacy. “We do not know what AI literacy is, how to use it, and how to teach with it. And we probably won’t for many years,” Reich said. 

The state’s new deals with Google, Microsoft, Adobe and IBM allow these tech companies to recruit new users — a benefit for the companies — but the actual lessons aren’t time-tested, he said. 

“Tech companies say: ‘These tools can save teachers time,’ but the track record is really bad,” said Reich. “You cannot ask schools to do more right now. They are maxed out.”

Erin Mote, the CEO of an education nonprofit called InnovateEDU, said she agrees that state and education leaders need to ask critical questions about the efficacy of the tools that tech companies offer but that schools still have an imperative to act. 

“There are a lot of rungs on the career ladder that are disappearing,” she said. “The biggest mistake we could make as educators is to wait and pause.”

Last year, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office signed an agreement with NVIDIA, a technology infrastructure company, to offer AI training similar to the kinds of lessons that Google, Microsoft, Adobe and IBM will deliver. 

Melissa Villarin, a spokesperson for the chancellor’s office, said the state won’t share data about how the NVIDIA program is going because the cohort of teachers involved is still too small. 

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.