Artificial intelligence (AI) has certainly transformed the way we see life. It can apparently do almost anything in a way impossible to believe when it was introduced nearly a decade ago. The way AI has become integrated into the education system cannot be disregarded as it has become a fact that everyone must relate to.
AI has affected the education systems at all grades and levels. Nowadays, you can easily see a college student writing an essay using an AI-generated outline. Equally, you can see a fourth-grade student asking AI to simplify a difficult mathematical equation. Despite the tremendous leap that has taken place to help educators and students in Egypt use AI responsibly, there are still tremendous problems in using it.
The use of AI in education has been rapidly increasing, especially after the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. Two years later, this was challenged by Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, and today there are also many others such as Google Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot.
“AI applications have changed the way the education system works. One cannot hide from such advanced technology, and instead one must embrace it to make the best use of it,” said Dina Al-Kordi, a pioneering trainer in the field of educational technology.
Al-Kordi, who has been in the field for more than 12 years, emphasises the importance of integrating AI tools in education as they can help both teachers and students enormously. For teachers, AI can offer a unique chance for them to enhance their capabilities, do tedious admin work, and improve the learning experience.
From adaptive learning platforms that personalise content for students to marking and grading multiple assessments, AI assistants can help teachers work more efficiently by offering tools such as intelligent tutoring systems, language learning applications, and virtual and augmented reality.
“AI can also offer simple tools such as making presentations using the materials you want, writing research papers, doing mind mapping, playing videos and VO (voice over), translation,” added Al-Kordi, also a lecturer at the French Department at Alexandria University.
“AI can certainly enrich the education process beyond textbooks. It can also help greatly in carrying out the administrative tasks that many teachers find time-consuming.”
AI supports STEM subjects too by offering hands-on learning experiences supplied by AI-generated video, which is close to virtual environments and virtual and augmented reality. Such tools are exciting advances that a few years ago would have been unheard of.
“Students respond very effectually to the course I teach called ‘AI Applications in the Media,’ and they find the result exceptional and very time saving. We help them to see how they can edit their photos and videos after capturing them themselves and how they can filter and edit them as much as they want. They can also use VO in Arabic to enhance production quality,” said Bassant Attia, head of the Media Department at the College of Language and Communication at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport (AASTMT).
Students can also greatly benefit from AI in their writing. AI can easily detect grammatical mistakes and correct them. It can also enhance student engagement and foster interactivity. “At AASTMT, for example, we have Kortext, a pioneering platform for digital learning that uses a chatbot to summarise chapters in books and generate questions,” Attia said.
“Above all, it greatly helps the student performance. It offers additional suggestions to the learning materials, and it can support visually impaired students and those who have any special needs by providing them with visual, audio, and machine-readable materials.”
However, many schools in Egypt have not yet integrated AI technologies, though progress is better in private education than in the public sector, especially in higher education. “The gap remains in training staff on how to use AI, and then there is also the need for a solid technological infrastructure and reliable Internet connections,” Attia said, suggesting that the government hold workshops sponsored by academic institutions, NGOs, or international partners to improve capacity.
There are downsides, though, since if AI is misused, it can lead to terrible consequences.
“There must be a regional and international framework to regulate the use of AI in education to make sure of data privacy, inequality issues, and bias in access,” Attia said.
Ethical considerations have become a pressing concern for all users of AI. “I can already see that AI has started to kill creativity, originality, and integrity among some students. For both teachers and students, AI should be a helping tool, adding to their own thinking and not the other way round. If not, in the long run it could lead to very dangerous consequences,” Al-Kordi said.
There are also privacy risks. “Some people might share their private lives with AI, chatting about personal and private issues. This is really dangerous, and privacy could be breached at any moment.”
“AI collects and analyses data that might raise privacy concerns, and the AI industry at large is consistently battling perceptions of the control of AI and whether it should have access to personal information or not,” she added.
One of the biggest drawbacks is bias and the possibility that AI might propagate inequalities. It might exclude different backgrounds in its preferences and choices, leading to unequal learning experiences.
Integrity and authenticity can also be lost. “Many students have started to hand in assignments plagiarised from AI content, which is totally unethical. In order to learn well, students must learn the hard way like we did rather than ask AI to do their work for them,” Al-Kordi said.
According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), in 2022 Egypt ranked 65th globally, second in Africa, and seventh among the Arab countries in the Government Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index.
This means that there have been significant advances made in the state’s use of AI and in Egypt’s commitment to advancing its capabilities in AI technology. This readiness comes in tandem with the Ministry of Education and Technical Education’s plan, announced a few months ago, to launch a new educational platform to equip students with the tools they need for their academic journey.
These tools include the integration of AI for a more personalised educational experience.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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