How the Arab world is adopting a proactive approach to AI

Since the blockbuster release of ChatGPT and the proliferation of AI in society, a debate has surged around costs, benefits, biases, and data and privacy concerns of this new technology — particularly with a focus on how it will impact the way we work.

Yet articles about the discussions in the Arab world — especially in the realm of education — are scarce.

In June, the EU passed a draft law known as the AI Act which would slap restrictions on the technology's riskiest usages. This comes in stark contrast to the non-existent AI policy in the United States, where technological advantages have a record of foregoing social costs and privacy concerns as epitomised by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's notorious motto "move fast and break things."

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The debate surrounding AI implications reflects a deeper schism about the uses and ethical concerns of technology but there is an opportunity for the Arab world to learn from the various perspectives, and it already has gotten a head start.

Regional interest in AI

In the United Arab Emirates, the first country to appoint a minister of state for AI in 2017, hundreds of government employees have undergone intensive training in generative AI through the Dubai Future Academy. The country also boasts the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a university devoted solely to AI graduate research.

In Saudi Arabia, in October 2020, the government unveiled a National Strategy for Data and AI, having established the Saudi Data and AI Authority and the National Centre for AI the year before. According to that vision, the government plans to train 20,000 data and AI specialists by 2030, with many of the Vision 2030 goals involving some aspect of data and AI.

To this end, the Kingdom's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology initiated a programme for undergraduates with the aim of training talented students to become leaders in the field of AI shortly around the time of Chat GPT's launch. 

Regional challenges and opportunities

In Lebanon, the decentralised nature of the technology has allowed people like Azzi to contribute to larger conversations but paradoxically, as the new technology becomes more and more monetised, digital hierarchies could worsen.

In other cash-reliant regional countries like Syria and Iraq, which remain largely cut off from the global financial system for reasons including war, sanctions, and corruption, paying for these services through credit cards could pose challenges.

The Lebanese Arabic language cultural publication Rehla Magazine, which self-describes as "experimental, underground, and free" dedicated its latest issue to AI with a dystopian twist. Its cover featured a young boy with his head partially split open, and cables protruding, like the interior of an iPhone.

In an article by Yaman Tohme titled "Things of the Imagination," she described the paradoxical nature of generative AI in the Arabic-speaking world.

"In these digital hierarchies, there is something that liberates us from them because they ignore us. Those algorithms fuelled by ignorance of the Arabic language will not be able to enslave its letters and volunteer them to the path of profit and domination," she wrote.

"We have the right to dream of the possibilities of creativity that the wave of artificial intelligence claims, for nothing but because we are in a world that feeds from our despair at the possibility of change."

Azzi, the English lecturer, said that the tool also helps students in Lebanon, for whom English is not their first language, navigate language obstacles in instances such as laboratory research.

According to data extracted from Google Search Trends, Lebanon ranked fifth globally in terms of the number of ChatGPT searches, a positive sign of the country's embrace of AI and machine learning technologies.

American faculty fall short 

Despite the fact that the United States remains a leading hub for AI research, in many instances, faculty have been falling short of addressing this new technology, said Flower Darby, associate director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

"Many, if not most faculty, are completely ignoring this. I think the faculty honestly do not have the energy after the last three years of tumultuous online teaching. They're already depleted and then this big, looming challenge comes up and they can't figure it out or deal with it."

In addition, Darby said that institutions do not offer guidance, despite the ubiquitous usage amongst students.

In some instances, professors lament the demise of traditional education and call the new technology a plague, fearing technology-aided plagiarism and cheating.

The ability to detect AI plagiarism has proven difficult. In fact, in one notorious instance at Texas A&M University–Commerce in May, an agriculture teacher wrongly used the software to detect cheating, putting student's diploma's in jeopardy.

Darby has been closely following the hyperbolic panic and chaos in the higher education landscape and has several recommendations, which she outlined in a recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In particular, she described the ethical qualms of demanding students to create an account and consent to volunteer their data to these companies.

One of the suggestions includes using the tool in group settings and having a student who already has an account use the tool. Another involves having a professor use the tool.

Addressing AI fears

The latter recommendation is exactly what Perry Klebahn, an entrepreneur, former head of Sales and Marketing for Patagonia, and co-founding member of Stanford's design school faculty, has been doing.

In early May, he co-taught a webinar with Sebastian Krakowski, a researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics who researches how AI can help augment our creativity. The first webinar for the public had 4,000 people.

"On past topics, I'd get only 50 questions, but we got 500 and most of them were very anxious," Klebahn said.

"Will AI take my job away? Is AI safe? Will AI cause my bank account to get hacked?"

Read more: The hysteria over AI throws up a broad range of risks

What he learned from that experience was to work with his students to use AI tools in the classroom, and to position himself in a learning posture beside them.

"I would wire up these big monitors and we would create a Zoom call in the classroom so everyone could work simultaneously and share screens. It sounds impersonal and it was, at times. But this is a tectonic shift, and every student should learn about this and be using it responsibly."

Klebahn's approach parallels that of Azzi's at the Lebanese American University, both of whom have embraced generative AI with students in the classroom while remaining critical of ethical concerns and inaccuracies and approaching it level-headed.

Klebahn described generative AI as a great "option engine" rather than an "answer engine," since it's "only as good as the inductive reasoning you put into it" and even then, there can be inaccuracies. 

On her part, Merve Tekgürler, a PhD candidate in History and MS student in symbolic systems at Stanford University, has been particularly excited about generative AI for research that involves training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th-century Ottoman Turkish, despite the data being biased toward European languages.

These academics believe the humanities are in a position to help steer debate at a time when most AI jobs are either related to engineering or policy.

"We need critical positionalities coming out of humanistic thought, especially a discipline like history that has a claim to the real and an engagement with the archive, is essential for studying how people are navigating these technologies."

Out with the old, in with the new

Not just in Klebahn's classroom, but around the world, traditional pedagogy is being revisited, with some professors overhauling their courses entirely.

At the Lebanese American University, part of the institution policy will include more of a focus on oral exams and presentations, according to Jordan Srour, LAU's Assistant Provost for Educational Resources and Innovation.

"We're also working on a flexible policy that will allow around 25 percent of grades to be earned through the use of AI."

Razan Abilmona, a 19-year-old finance student at LAU, said she learned from Azzi's Technology, Ethics and, Global Society class how to "consciously use AI" whenever she reached a block.

"Sometimes it helped, other times it did not. I ended up liking and using my own ideas instead. Sometimes it triggered me to think of better ideas, especially when the responses were too general. AI is what we make it to be, how we use it, we control it, it does not control us."

"The conscious and ethical use of AI in Lebanon would be great. In my opinion, it is not a job destroyer but a new technology field. With the current unemployment rates, this could be a huge push."