AI in Education: Decoding Japan's New Guidelines

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. the education system in japan has just made a big announcement regarding how students and teachers should be treating ai and i think this is actually really interesting i want to cover the story because i believe there's a lot of really interesting things we can learn they cite a lot of really interesting statistics that i believe apply to wherever you live of course i think a majority of my listeners are in the united states but over 50 of you are all around the world and so i think this is a really applicable topic that's very interesting but essentially the education ministry in Japan, they really noted the need for students to understand artificial intelligence and a bunch of new guidelines they just released.

1:05And essentially, they were talking about how AI can be integrated into school and also precautions that are needed to address some of the risks that they see with AI. One of the things that they said specifically is that students should comprehend a bunch of the characteristics of AI, including some of its advantages and disadvantages. Of course this makes perfect sense but they also said they specifically wanted to highlight teaching students about information leakages and copyright infringements that come out of AI two problems that we know are quite prevalent and they want you know students to know this before they actually use it so according to some of these guidelines they explicitly kind of state that passing off reports essays or any other works produced by AI as one's own is not appropriate it.

1:51So obviously they are wanting their students to cite their sources. Interestingly, one of the areas they specifically highlight that they would like their students to use AI for is for English learning and encouraging, you know, integrating it into different group activities so students can ask about and address different perspectives. They specifically said, quote, we are committed to addressing these concerns, enhancing teachers, understanding and skills, and fostering a safe and Effective Environment for AI Utilization in Education. That was Education Minister Kaiko Nagako. But essentially, these guidelines are going to be shared with the boards of education and a bunch of other organizations.

2:32But Hizanobu Muto, a school digitization project team leader at the ministry, also said, quote, I believe that it is necessary to proceed with some experimental activities based on the guidelines in schools, taking full consideration of personal data protection security and copyright to fully examine the outcomes and and contribute to further discussions in the future so i think that essentially over there their ministry really just kind of focused on the importance of ai literacy among teachers a lot of these guidelines are encouraging teachers as well to use fake information generated by ai as teaching material which i thought was super super interesting and the idea behind this is they want students to essentially learn how to fact check and how to like identify something that might sound really accurate but AI might just be hallucinating and you know spit something out so I thought that was really interesting that they're bringing that up and using that as a teaching a teaching mechanism for their students they also promote the use of AI to like they're obviously telling teachers to use this to reduce your workloads use it in administrative tasks and in other areas I think they really want teachers and students to start integrating this into everything they're doing so they can understand a lot of the different pros and cons.

3:47And I think the reason for that is because, well, I guess I'll give you a quote, but it's by Mudo. And he said, if teachers themselves become familiar with the new technologies and learn how to use it in a convenient, safe and smart way, they're going to be able to respond appropriately in their educational activities. He said, we need to improve teachers, AI literacy and promote working style reforms by conducting teacher trainings and promoting the appropriate use of information in public service. So I think what's really interesting here is that there was actually a statistic released that said, I believe, 44 % of parents who have used ChatGPT said that they're worried or relatively worried about the use of AI chatbots by children.

4:32But that number actually increased to almost 73 % for people who had not used ChatGPT. So people that haven't used some of these AI tools are actually more worried about it. And so I think that's one of the reasons why they're really focusing on getting everyone to use it, everyone to try it out and test it out, because you're going to understand the capabilities and you're not just going to see some article about the end of the world because of AI or different perspectives if you don't actually have the experience of using these things. I think another interesting thing was over 49 % of people surveyed said they were relatively anxious about this.

5:12And so I think it is, obviously something that was a survey done by Cyber Owl. It's a Tokyo-based company. They surveyed about 508 parents. But in any case, I think the government really plans to request that AI companies are, you know, considering improving their products from the perspective of educational use in Japan and, you know, filtering out different types of content and, you know, personal information protections they would like integrated into this. So I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this moves forward. But I think this is very cool to see, you know, the Ministry of Education over in Japan, obviously taking this seriously, obviously focusing on ways that they're going to really integrate AI into their students' learning and AI into their teachers teaching and the ways that that is going to help benefit and really set their country apart.

6:00We've seen Japan take some big steps. They really want to be the forefront of AI. Another controversial thing that they recently said was essentially they said copyright issues and AI are not going to be enforced in Japan because they don't want copyright to slow down the progress of AI. And so they're kind of taking the opposite approach of the eu at the moment so i think it's going to be really interesting i believe ai will be very big in japan they're obviously starting right at the education level and getting it in and so it's going to be interesting to see how ai in japan and also around the world kind of play into this whole education piece and i believe the countries and places that are integrating this into the educational experience are going to be the ones that see the most innovation in AI in the future.