Artificial intelligence is present in today’s society and, as a result, its use is widespread across the different fields of life. In education, whether formal or informal, it is no different.
In contemporary education, an intensification of the use of digital technologies is observed, with a more significant use of platforms as pedagogical resources and, above all, of artificial intelligences, both by students and by educators. However, it becomes necessary to problematize whether artificial intelligence represents an advance or a threat to human formation, questioning how all of this impacts the ways of teaching, learning, and producing knowledge.
Inspired by the critical perspective of Paulo Freire (1996), it is understood that educational practice is historically and politically situated. For this reason, one cannot hide the social, cultural, and economic dimension that the use of AI brings to education. We understand that its use must be mediated: at the same time that it broadens pedagogical possibilities, the importance of the critical use of AIs and respect for the educator’s knowledge—their practices, knowledge, and experiences—must be reinforced, preventing knowledge from being reduced to teaching products or platforms.
In this text, the conscious and critical use of these technologies is defended, so that students do not merely copy answers, but understand how this data is produced, by whom, and for what purposes. In addition, it is essential that they know how their data is collected and used. Research such as that of Zuboff (2015) shows that the growing use of platforms in education generates the collection and monetization of data, which the author calls surveillance capitalism, turning everything done on the internet into data. In education, this is reflected in the transformation of teachers and students into sources of data, bringing ethical implications regarding privacy, autonomy, and pedagogical freedom, as well as reducing the complexity of the pedagogical process to quantitative metrics, disregarding essential qualitative dimensions of human formation.
Teaching and learning with AI
Didactics, as a theoretical-practical field, has as its object the intentional organization of the teaching-learning process, articulating objectives, contents, methods, and assessments. According to Libâneo (2013), didactics must be understood as the mediation between systematized knowledge and the subjects in formation, considering their concrete conditions of existence. From this perspective, the insertion of AI into the educational context cannot be reduced to an instrumental dimension, but must be analyzed in its capacity to transform pedagogical relationships.
When thinking about the possibilities of AI and technologies in education, one perceives the potential they offer in access to information, in the diversification of pedagogical strategies, and in collaborative learning.
Lévy (1994) proposes the concept of collective intelligence in the virtual environment: for the author, knowledge can be built in a distributed way in digital environments, favoring participatory and interactive practices. Similarly, Henry Jenkins (2006) emphasizes the emergence of a convergence culture, in which subjects cease to be mere consumers to become producers of content, which opens space for methodologies that value authorship, collaboration, and student agency. In this context, approaches such as active methodologies and project-based learning gain relevance, as they make it possible to integrate digital technologies more meaningfully into the educational process.
However, Jenkins (2006) warns of the existence of a participation gap: inequalities of access and of digital literacy prevent all students from participating on equal terms, which requires from the teacher a specific pedagogical attention to digital inclusion. Initiatives such as Internet Segura, Inclusão Tech, Bytes da Mudança, and Conectar Ideias, all developed by Casa Hacker, seek to promote the digital inclusion of children, youth, and adults, because we understand that technological mediations have the potential to broaden access to information, bringing new ways of being and existing in the world.
A group of people aged 50+ in Casa Hacker’s digital inclusion workshops
All these training programs developed by Casa Hacker are aligned with the recommendations of UNESCO (2019), which holds that the use of artificial intelligence in education should help to personalize learning and broaden access to knowledge. However, its implementation must be guided by ethical principles—such as equity, transparency, and data protection—with human mediation being essential to ensure an inclusive and quality education.
It is still necessary to consider that the excessive use of these tools can generate pressure for productivity, excessive gamification, and a logic of performance misaligned with the principles of critical education, adding to the digital inequalities that reveal differences in the digital literacy and the critical capacity of subjects.
In this sense, regulations such as the ECA Digital (2024)—an update to Brazil’s Child & Adolescent Statute for the digital environment—are fundamental for establishing specific protections for children and adolescents in the digital environment, prohibiting the collection of data for commercial purposes without consent and forbidding the use of dark patterns—design patterns that manipulate user behavior to maximize engagement.
Children in Casa Hacker’s digital inclusion workshops
In summary, AIs constitute a field of possibilities and tensions that challenges education to reinvent itself without losing its commitment to critical and emancipatory formation. If, on the one hand, they broaden access to knowledge and enable new forms of interaction and learning, on the other, they introduce dynamics of control, surveillance, and standardization that can compromise pedagogical autonomy, teaching work, and the ways of learning. Thus, the educator must adopt a critical stance, guided by ethics, contextualized and committed to building a democratic and socially referenced education.
References
FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia da autonomia: saberes necessários à prática educativa. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1996.
JENKINS, Henry. Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
LÉVY, Pierre. A inteligência coletiva: por uma antropologia do ciberespaço. São Paulo: Loyola, 1994.
LIBÂNEO, José Carlos. Didática. 2. ed. São Paulo: Cortez, 2013.
UNESCO. Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Paris: UNESCO, 2019.
ZUBOFF, Shoshana. Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology, v. 30, n. 1, p. 75–89, 2015.