SAN ANTONIO – Artificial intelligence platforms are making their way to the classroom, and educators say they have the potential to both help and harm students.
These artificial intelligence, or AI, programs can perform tasks that normally require human brains to do, like visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
“I just dove right in with my students, and teaching about it, not knowing much at all, but learning with them,” said Rachelle Dene Poth, a Pennsylvania teacher who spent most of last week coaching Texas educators how to use this technology.
Poth has been interested in AI for years now, and incorporates it into her Spanish and STEAM lessons at school.
“I’ll start them with some basics and explain, you know, what machine learning is and what a neural network is, and then let them experience it,” Poth said. “We’ll do some exploring, consuming it and then move into creating. You can have students create chatbots, you can have them do things with coding. There’s some interactive things online, depending on access to resources, where they can program a self driving car.”
She says this is important, especially since new programs keep launching.
ChatGPT launched in November. It operates like dialogue. You type in a prompt and the program gives you an answer, a follow up question, and it can challenge your argument.
It has started lots of conversations about its potential uses for plagiarism.
Other AI apps have already rolled out in classrooms to help teachers grade, check for copies or plagiarism, help visually impaired students read text, and even provide emotional support through conversation.
“We’ll do some kind of exploring, consuming it, and then move into creating, because you can have students create chatbots, you can have them do things with coding…” Poth said.
Dhireesha Kudithipudi, who runs the Matrix AI program for UTSA, says these programs are already being used in colleges as well.
“At UTSA, we have programs that are helping introduce AI to all levels of our undergraduate and graduate students,” Kudithipudi said.
She says they can also help individualize how students learn.
“There is lot of excitement, anxiousness and nervousness around this technology,” Kudithipudi said. “Rightfully so, because of what we are seeing out there. There is lot of good that AI can do for the next generation.”
But there are downsides here too. We asked ChatGPT to write a book report for us on The Scarlet Letter. In under a minute, it produced more than 400 words on the topic. Complete, comprehendible sentences. There was an introductory paragraph complete with a thesis, body paragraphs that corresponded with claims in the thesis, and a conclusion. When we ran it through a plagiarism checker, another form of AI, only one sentence is exactly copied from somewhere else.
So how do you prevent this in schools? Teachers say the answer to that isn’t clear yet.
“It’s just the concern of them having access to finding answers or having work being done for them,” Poth explained. “Also, privacy and security, those issues are huge.”
Kudithipudi also says we should be cautious when taking all the thoughts and ideas AI programs generate as fact.
“A lot of these tools are built on immense sets of data from the web…” Kudithipudi explained. “And if this data has implicit bias, then whatever is going to be the outcome of that AI tool can contribute to some of those biases. So we should be very careful how we are going to use these tools in educational programs in a formal setting.”
Poth says that’s why she’s already discussing AI with her students and bringing up the ethical questions to them right now.
“To have a space where they can build skills and ask questions, and express concerns, like, even my eighth graders will come up and say, ‘I wish we had a course that was all about ethics’… they’ll name different topics, because they’re concerned about it,” Poth said. “We can’t keep them from using it, even if it’s blocked at school, we know that they can access it in other ways.”
Kudithipudi says AI is already helping us in multiple industries, and it would be a disservice to not teach students all the ways it can be used.
“It’s really helping us in detecting critical medical conditions that we were not able to do so before, it is helping us in using security and surveillance and protect our nation in several regards that we are not able to do without this technology….” Kudithipudi said. “It is a critical technology, and it will be a part of our life increasingly as we move forward.”
Both teachers acknowledge AI can be difficult to keep up with, but you don’t have to do it alone.
Kudithipudi recommends programs at your local library or through UTSA if you want to learn more about it to help facilitate these conversations with your child.
“AI is not the future, it is here today,” Kudithipudi said.