If AI is “critical” for “preparing students” to become well-rounded members of society, as US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon recently claimed, we all might be in trouble. A massive government experiment in South Korean to roll out 76 AI-generated textbooks has ended just four months in, after the program proved to be a catastrophe. Called the “AI Digital Textbook Promotion Plan,” the initiative formed as a partnership with a dozen publishing companies championed by disgraced former President Yoon Suk Yeol in June of 2023. According to Rest of World, the textbooks first became available when the South Korean school year began last March. Lawmakers promised students the textbooks would offer personalized learning in math, English, and coding, while teachers were told they would lower the workload and prevent dropouts. Yet when they hit the classroom, the books turned out to be full of embarrassing errors, demanding much more time and energy from students and teachers alike. Though part of the government’s pitch was that generating textbooks with AI would make the publishing process much faster, textbooks from at least one publisher were significantly delayed. One high school student told RoW that “all our classes were delayed because of technical…
