Have you sat with your child to review their lessons, only to be surprised when they briefly use their phone and return with answers to all the questions the teacher posed in class? We all experience the same astonishment with the emergence of new generations of artificial intelligence tools that are gradually replacing humans. While they bring hope, they also come with greater challenges and fears!
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that focuses on solving cognitive and perceptual problems related to human capabilities at high speeds. These capabilities, where robots replace humans, include visual and auditory perception, planning, data analysis, decision-making, learning, authoring, and design. The applications of modern intelligence are astonishing in fields such as industry, medicine, education, banking, and others. Therefore, by 2030, AI is expected to add 15 trillion dollars to the global economy.
This is happening because AI operates through algorithms designed to work just like the human brain and its neural networks, providing deeper data analysis to understand relationships, known as “deep learning” (DL). From this emerged “generative intelligence” (Gen AI), which can form deeper insights beyond simple logic, extending to writing poems and creative works.
The Muslim Ummah cannot advance without genuinely embracing modern sciences and quickly joining the progress. Certainly, information and communication technologies, particularly in machinery, robotics, nanotechnology, space technology, biotechnology, and computing, all related to the information boom that has changed societies, are at the forefront of what contemporary Muslims need to be familiar with and encourage their children to learn.
How Do We Address Intellectual Property Concerns?
AI applications face a storm of concern from parents and thought leaders. Publishers wonder whether the author is giving them the essence of their thoughts or the thoughts of a robot, teachers in classrooms and nearly all institutions, from universities to research centers, and even creative arenas. And we have seen artistic exhibitions, novels, and stories prepared using modern intelligence!
Thus, parents worry whether their children will develop a tendency towards taking the easy way out, turning their role into mere drivers of AI, away from cultivating mental faculties, reading, and creativity.
Since the appearance of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been attempts to establish safeguards against cheating and fraud using these technologies. Dr. Vaughan Connolly, a visiting professor at Cambridge University, says that teachers need to educate students about academic integrity and build trust around using AI.
Interactive Learning Beyond Borders
On the other hand, AI applications have real advantages that can effectively contribute to the educational process, expanding students' imagination and immersion in studying scientific subjects (such as exploring the human body, the depths of the seas and oceans, specific historical eras, and places you have never visited, learning about it in details). They can be used in teaching all sciences and literature interactively and enjoyably.
These applications enable teachers worldwide to explain lessons engagingly, assess student performance, monitor them, encourage participation, and foster creative interaction, with broader possibilities for repeating specific parts of lessons in easier ways for those who struggle to understand.
Major countries like Japan and Australia have integrated AI into their educational curricula due to its ability to provide a richer and more enjoyable learning experience. This includes gamification, voice recognition, chatbots, virtual and augmented reality (AR), all of which align with individual learners' needs and their age stages, overcoming geographical obstacles that have long prevented students from being enrolled in education, especially in times of war, emergencies, natural disasters, and pandemics, known as “distance learning,” and providing virtual teachers for all lessons at educational stages.
The Muslim Child in the Age of Intelligence
In her study on learning for the Muslim child in the modern “society 5.0” or AI-connected era, Chissya El-Laudza, a professor at Muhammadiyah University in Indonesia, asserts that the task of parents and teachers is now more complicated. They face a generation that relies on modern learning methods far from books. Hence, the task is to integrate religious sciences, Quran memorization, knowing the lives of the prophets and companions, and the important historical events of our Ummah, along with modern worldly sciences, into an interactive system that ensures close engagement and the absorption of many contents and the practice of creativity.
But how can teachers avoid the dangers of AI? Professor David Williams, an education expert at the University of Wisconsin, says AI language is available and accessible to students for wide-ranging research and exploration. Therefore, teachers should rely on exercises that do not depend on mere definitions and summaries, which robots excel at creating, and move towards questions that measure the student's level of critical thinking and personal analysis of what they have personally read.
On the other hand, Robinson adds that teachers can make lessons more thought-provoking and encourage students to think about the chatbot's responses themselves – whether they align with our values and ideas, especially in religion and values. Students should learn how to use this inevitable tool – whether we like it or not – in ways that benefit our world, such as predicting dangers that threaten the homeland. They should also understand the techniques of handling smart chats, how to craft the best search phrases, and develop them to get the best answers, and how to use those results for tangible benefits in life.
Our role as a Muslim community is to educate a generation equipped with contemporary technologies, without neglecting the ethical and purposeful background of using these tools, enabling the new generation to lead the AI train towards building their societies, creatively solving their era's problems, conducting simulations to avoid potential dangers, and most importantly, feeding Western AI algorithms to prevent biased results against Arabs and Islam, and confronting their technologically armed enemies (Israel uses smart weapons against innocent people in Gaza and Lebanon).
We can also use this world to correct stereotypes about Islam and Muslims, create effective virtual communication between young Muslims around the world, benefit in translating the Quran into new languages, seek documented contemporary fatwas, and form an active Muslim public opinion that transcends borders.
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