AI: A Force for Good, or A Force for Evil?

The concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for years. Most of us have been unconcerned with it, except in some distant, science fiction-y kind of way (I, Robot, anyone...?). 
So what has happened in the last few weeks that's created such a buzz about AI in the education community?

The acceleration of technology, and what it can achieve, has brought AI-generated content into our everyday lives. Apps that will create images, video, and music via AI are now widely available, allowing anyone to create their own media with just a few clicks: 

• The Best Free AI Art Generators, Ranked [Gizmodo]
• The Best AI Music Generators [Unite.ai]

"Professor Dog Teaches a Class," courtesy of Skrawdaddy,
​created with Midjourney AI.

These tools are amazing in terms of the content that can be generated, even compared to just a few years ago. But even so, none of the media-generating bots seemed to bother the majority of educators all that much.

So what has happened in the last few weeks that's sending the education community into such a frenzy? In November 2022, ChatGPT made its debut. In a nutshell, you enter a query with ChatGPT, the tool accesses an enormous database and comes up with an answer. The beauty of ChatGPT is that the responses sound... well, they sound like they were NOT artificially generated! ​

And therein lies the rub - students with access to a tool that will generate human-sounding written responses is a scary prospect for educators. ​

Click here to watch a ChatGPT TikTok video, which has a little fun with educators' biggest fears about chatbots...

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In this YouTube video, Ryan Reynolds tasks ChatGPT with writing a script for an ad "in the style of Ryan Reynolds":

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Do you remember how you felt when cell phones started proliferating in classrooms? The first instinct for many of us was to ban student phones from being used in the classroom altogether, but eventually most faculty found ways to leverage the use of these mobile devices - polling, research, content creation - all to improve student learning.

Click the image to access the downloadable PDF.

My question to you is this: Are today's AI-bots analogous to student cell phones 15 years ago? Can we get past our initial instinct to throw out the AI "baby" with the bathwater, so that we can find ways to leverage these tools to support student learning? The following 3 articles (all included in this PDF) may help you find that leverage:

• "Schools declare war against Chat GPT," Fortune
• "Chat GPT: A Must-see Before the Semester Begins," Faculty Focus
• "Embrace the Bot: Designing Writing Assignments in the Face of AI," Faculty Focus