Imaginaries of responsible generative AI in secondary education

This chapter investigates methods for bridging the divide between current Artificial Intelligence (AI) imaginaries and future ones, drawing on a research project that worked with young people to explore futures for ‘Responsible AI’ (RAI) principles of explainability, fairness, and privacy in three secondary schools in Scotland and England, using speculative and participatory methods. The chapter explores a disconnect between how young people perceived Generative AI (GenAI) and how they described education and schools. Despite expressing critical perspectives about GenAI, young people generally did not apply these perspectives to critique or reimagine schools or schooling in a current or future age of pervasive AI in Education (AIED). Instead, their orientation to AIED futures was one of conserving and preserving education, protecting what they saw as its foundational qualities – hard work, trustworthiness, and detachment from the extractive, datafied world. The chapter explores the need to tread carefully when attempting to mobilise young people's voices around RAI in education.