Blog Post Share: “An AI Wrote This Blog Post”
Daily Resource / December 12th, 2022
A few months ago I was teaching a session on digital literacy/citizenship and I posed a simple question, “Should students learn about Artificial Intelligence?”
The answer generally from 30+ educators was “Of course not.” Not enough time in the curriculum, too little expertise in our teacher pool, students don’t need to know this. I immediately shot back, “Of course they do.” We are surrounded by AI now more than ever and it is only getting better and easier to use in daily life. Take these two examples just from the last few weeks:
I was listening to a favorite podcast of mine recorded within the last few weeks. In front of a live audience, they pulled out a script for their podcast completely written by an AI. The script was eerily similar to how the hosts act on the podcast and how they interact not only with the audience but also with each other. They read two different scripts and both followed a simple, yet accurate model for how their podcast usually goes. The script was written by the AI in less than a minute.
This morning, I opened my social feeds to find that Eric Curts from Control Alt Achieve had not only written an article about AI but had let the AI write a portion of the article. Just like the podcast, it was eerily similar to how Eric writes in his blog posts and added a lot of information about the power/detriments of AI in the classroom, all of which read like a convincing post. I had to re-read the article to check where the break from Eric’s writing to the AI-produced writing was as both sections are fairly similar. Read it for yourself by clicking on the picture.
Tools like OpenAI’s Chat, Alexa, or Siri are now just that good. They have been used by educators to explore the future of edtech, but also to write lesson plans and materials for their classrooms at a fraction of the time that they would normally need to complete the tasks. If educators are figuring out how to minimalize time-intensive projects like lesson planning documentation, then you can be sure that students are learning to use AI to write their essays, answer route memorization questions, and generally help students avoid the routine work of learning.
Now, I am not ringing a warning bell, but educators do need to be realistic when we look at AI. It is a part of students’ daily lives if they have a smartphone and will only be increasingly a part of their lives. Educators, myself included, need to be informed about AI, and take time to explore how it is being used by education and learners, but also how we can develop learning activities and assessments that can’t be replicated using AI. That is why I love practices like personalized, competency-based learning. The choice and voice parts of learning can have more emphasis and students are able to better explore a specific learning tract in your classroom that engages them to build a unique product.
