By Dr Stephen Jeffares
Department of Public Administration and Policy
Associate Professor
Director of Postgraduate Research, INLOGOV
For parents of young children, the end of term errand list includes “pick up a present for the teacher”. It seems best teacher mugs and budget prosecco is being replaced by online collection pots. The most organised parent on the WhatsApp group sets up the link, parents donate and have the choice to write a message of thanks: “James! I’m sending some money to say thank you to Miss W, what do you want in the message?”
Here’s a handful of actual messages from my son’s class collection pot last week:
- I will miss you Miss W, good luck in your new school.
- Thank you for being a great teacher, Miss W. I have had lots of fun in your class. I will miss you xxx
- To Miss W, Thank you for teaching me lots. I will miss you very much. Lots of love
My own son’s message brought a lump to my throat as he asked me to add this:
To Miss W You have been a brilliant teacher. You have been really kind and helpful, because sometimes I struggle with my work.
Infant teachers get to know their children well over the year and I have no doubt that when Miss W gets to read these messages she will connect emotionally with these messages and know exactly why my son chose to mention struggling with his work.
Online collection pots offer an alternative to 29 boxes of Guylian seashells.
Enter AI. Recently the message box now offers the choice of an “AI (Artificial Intelligence) Suggest” button. It seems Collection Pot has integrated some form of GPT (generative pre‐trained transformers) tool into its platform.
Click the button and as if by magic a personalised 50-word message fills the box of between 47 and 50 words. Do you want Heartfelt, Warm, Friendly or Excited? There were largely indistinguishable – here is a rather gushing Heartfelt:
As you embark on a new chapter, Miss, know that your presence will be deeply missed. Your dedication and kindness have left an indelible mark on us all. May your future endeavors be filled with success and happiness. We stand behind you with unwavering support.
Yuck. Yes, quicker than asking your child to come up with a message to go with the contribution – but no 7-year-old, or parent for that matter would say this. It is hard to pinpoint what is wrong with such a message, but it feels inauthentic wordy and verbose. It is marching to the wrong beat.
No one in our group came close to using the suggested texts, few would, and if so, why should it matter? It matters because this is only the beginning. Buttons like this are set to appear in all sorts of applications we will use to transact communications. Messenger apps and email have been using autoreply suggestions for some time now. And transactions between public servant and citizens have a particular status – they are what Goodsell in the late 1970s labelled public encounters. This has evolved over last five decades from, in this case, school gate and classroom threshold to remote telephone calls and asynchronous emails and messages over education platform apps like Tapestry. And now we have generative AI in the mix.
Generative AI will increasingly aid in how we write and consume our emails. For public servants who have limited time it is helping to manage overflowing inboxes, help them prioritise and free up their time. In primary education this could be preparing lessons or working with children that need the most help. For parents it could save them time, help them formulate the issue in a way that get the teacher to sit up and take the issue seriously. AI is going to, and is already, changing the interface between state and citizen, the public encounter.
Although the example above was labelled AI, it felt more like a template. In education this is by no means new – for some years now report management software helps teachers write pithy paragraphs for each subject – choosing from a selection of pre-written statements about a student in each subject area. James is an imaginative writer… /James is beginning to get to grips… / James tries hard with his writing
Gone are the days of the cutting “he will never amount to anything” (Einstein), or “he will either go to prison or become a millionaire” (Branson) type of school reports. There is a carefully worded positivity to school reports where teachers know what they mean, and parents try to read between the lines.
The benefit for the teacher is it saves vast amounts of time. For the parent they get more (words of) feedback and detail on what the child has been doing and the general direction. But it also runs the risk of numbing, of anesthetising the public encounter – like the AI collection pot replies they are longer and more detailed than the children’s messages – but they do not come from the heart.
As these changes continue to evolve in how public servants and citizens transact, we need more research to explore what this means for trust, empathy and the overall relationship. The clunky template messages will soon be a thing of the past. The next iteration will be based on generative AI that, in the case of education, will combine the test scores, rubrics, teacher’s notes, attendance and behaviour records to generate individualised human sounding school reports written mostly by AI with supervision and tweaks by a human. Experiments have shown that such responses have been judged more trustworthy than those written entirely by AI or by humans alone.
So, as the end of term goes by, and you have written a message and given a box of seashells to your child’s teacher instead of using technology – the autogenerate AI might be rubbish this year but next year who knows.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Birmingham.