This week, Class 5H has been exploring what AI is, how it can be useful and where its limitations lie. We started the discussion by looking at the following image: ‘Everyone poops, except Claude’ and the children were quick to point out that Claude, an AI platform, cannot poop because it isn’t human. This sparked a brilliant conversation about what else makes us uniquely human.
We then turned our attention to emotional intelligence. When I asked the children what they thought it meant, they gave thoughtful and interesting responses:
“The ability to walk into a room and read the atmosphere or know when someone is sad.”
“It includes all emotions, from sadness to happiness.”
“It’s putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and feeling empathy for them.”
Together, we agreed that these qualities – reading a room, feeling emotions and showing empathy – are things Claude simply cannot do because it isn’t human.
The children then explored scenarios in which AI had been used unfairly, such as writing a child’s school report or rejecting a pupil’s application to a new school. The pupils were quick to point out that decisions like these should be made by a human, not a machine.
