Adventures in AI

This week's adventures in AI, parts one and two, provided the opportunity to explore a variety of AI tools. Since artificial intelligence isn't going anywhere soon, educators will need to become familiar with the tools and ethical dilemmas that students will face.

In the first part of the exercise, being an AI detective, I quickly realized that I am thankful that I don’t teach high school. I feel for those educators navigating the quickly evolving world of student writing. After reading the eight responses, I do not have any concrete way to know which was student-written and which was an AI-generated response. I do think that students wrote the majority of the responses. I could find some slight hints of humanity in the posts, especially the ones written in the first person, with minor grammatical and formatting errors, and those that shared a personal connection to the prompt. I think AI is more likely to have written numbers 3 and 8. Number three had a medical disclaimer at the bottom that seemed too exact to be written by a student. Number eight, the consistent use of vocabulary throughout also made me suspicious.

I also explored some AI tools this week. Bing Copilot is a new tool for me, and I enjoyed the illustrations it created for a “k12 Texas Teacher”. I also asked for a “k12 Teacher” to see how the “Texas” would influence its creation. 

This is similar to Canva’s image creator, which I found out that my students absolutely thought was the most fantastic thing. The art teacher even used this as a reward for behavior. Whoever got the most points came up and created an image for the class—brilliant! 

I then went onto Chat GPT to see if it could create a lesson for me, given specific parameters. I asked it to make a lesson based on The Library Dragon for 4th graders with a STEM base for stations. It quickly came back with a framework that I could use. I then asked it to put the lesson in a table format so that I could quickly make slides in Canva for each station. It was scary easy!