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Artificial Intelligence - Office of Educational Technology

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Artificial Intelligence - Office of Educational Technology

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Today, many priorities for improvements to teaching and learning are unmet. Educators seek technology-enhanced approaches addressing these priorities that would be safe, effective, and scalable. Like all of us, educators use AI-powered services in their everyday lives, such as voice assistants in their homes; tools that can correct grammar, complete sentences, and write essays; and automated trip planning on their phones. As a result, educators see opportunities to use AI-powered capabilities like speech recognition to increase the support available to students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and others who could benefit from greater adaptivity and personalization in digital tools for learning. They are further exploring how AI can enable writing or improving lessons, as well as their process for finding, choosing, and adapting material for use in their lessons.

Educators are also aware of new risks. Useful, powerful functionality can also be accompanied with new data privacy and security risks. Educators recognize that AI can automatically produce output that is inappropriate or wrong. They are wary that the associations or automations created by AI may amplify unwanted biases. They have noted new ways in which students may represent others' work as their own. They are well-aware of "teachable moments" and pedagogical strategies that a human teacher can address but are undetected or misunderstood by AI models. They worry whether recommendations suggested by an algorithm would be fair. Educators' concerns are manifold.

Everyone in education has a responsibility to harness the good to serve educational priorities while also protecting against the dangers that may arise as a result of AI being integrated in educational technology.

NEW!! Report on AI and the Future of Teaching & Learning

Key Insights

AI enables new forms of interaction. Students and teachers can speak, gesture, sketch, and use other natural human modes of communication to interact with a computational resource and each other. AI can generate human-like responses, as well. These new forms of action may provide supports to students with disabilities.

AI can help educators address variability in student learning. With AI, designers can anticipate and address the long tail of variations in how students can successfully learn-whereas traditional curricular resources were designed to teach to the middle or most common learning pathways. For example, AI-enabled educational technology may be deployed to adapt to each student's English language abilities with greater support for the range of skills and needs among English learners.

AI supports powerful forms of adaptivity. Conventional technologies adapt based upon the correctness of student answers. AI enables adapting to a student's learning process as it unfolds step-by-step, not simply providing feedback on right or wrong answers. Specific adaptations may enable students to continue strong progress in a curriculum by working with their strengths and working around obstacles.

AI can enhance feedback loops. AI can increase the quality and quantity of feedback provided to students and teachers, as well as suggesting resources to advance their teaching and learning.

AI can support educators. Educators can be involved in designing AI-enabled tools to make their jobs better and to enable them to better engage and support their students.

Recommendations: Call to Action for Education Leaders

Recommendation #1: Emphasize Humans in the Loop

We reject the notion of AI as replacing teachers. Teachers and other people must be "in the loop" whenever AI is applied in order to notice patterns and automate educational processes. We call upon all constituents to adopt Humans-in-the-Loop as a key criteria.

Recommendation #2: Align AI Models to a Shared Vision for Education

We call upon educational decision makers, researchers, and evaluators to determine the quality of an educational technology based not only on outcomes, but also based on the degree to which the models at the heart of the AI tools and systems align to a shared vision for teaching and learning. The figure to the right describes the important qualities of AI models for education leaders to consider.

Recommendation #3: Design Using Modern Learning Principles

Achieving effective systems requires more than processing "big data"-it requires more than data science. Applications of AI must be based on established, modern learning principles, the wisdom of educational practitioners, and should leverage the expertise in the educational assessment community around detecting bias and improving fairness. Going forward, we also must seek to create AI systems that are culturally responsive and culturally sustaining, leveraging the growth of published techniques for doing so. Further, most early AI systems had few specific supports for students with disabilities and English learners and we must ensure that AI-enabled learning resources are intentionally inclusive of these students.

Recommendation #4: Prioritize Strengthening Trust

Technology can only help us to achieve educational objectives when we trust it. Yet, we learned through a series of public listening sessions that distrust of educational technology and AI is commonplace. Because trust develops as people meet and relate to each other, we call for a focus on building trust and establishing criteria for trustworthiness of emerging educational technologies within the associations, convenings, and professional organizations that bring educators, innovators, researchers, and policymakers together.

Recommendation #5: Inform and Involve Educators

We call on educational leaders to prioritize informing and involving educational constituents so they are prepared to investigate how and when AI fits specific teaching and learning needs, and what risks may rise. Now is the time to show the respect and value we hold for educators by informing and involving them in every step of the process of designing, developing, testing, improving, adopting, and managing AI-enabled educational technology. This includes involving educators in reviewing existing AI-enabled systems, tools, and data use in schools, designing new applications of AI based on teacher input, carrying out pilot evaluations of proposed new instructional tools, collaborating with developers to increase the trustworthiness of the deployed system, and raising issues about risks and unexpected consequences as the system is implemented.

Recommendation #6: Focus R&D on Addressing Context and Enhancing Trust and Safety

Research that focuses on how AI-enabled systems can adapt to context (diversity among learners, variability in instructional approaches, differences in educational settings) is essential to answering the question "Do specific applications of AI work in education, and if so, for whom and under what conditions?" We call upon researchers and their funders to prioritize investigations of how AI can address the long tail of learning variability and to seek advances in how AI can incorporate contextual considerations when detecting patterns and recommending options to students and teachers. Further, researchers should accelerate their attention to how to enhance trust and safety in AI-enabled systems for education.

Recommendation #7: Develop Education-Specific Guidelines and Guardrails

Data privacy regulation already covers educational technology; further, data security is already a priority of school educational technology leaders. Modifications and enhancements to the status quo will be required to address the new capabilities alongside the risks of AI. We call for involvement of all perspectives in the ecosystem to define a set of guidelines (such as voluntary disclosures and technology procurement checklists) and guardrails (such as enhancements to existing regulations or additional requirements) so that we can achieve safe and effective AI for education.

Listening Sessions

The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology, with support from Digital Promise, held listening sessions about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We connected with all constituents involved in making decisions about technology in education, including but not limited to teachers, educational leaders, students, parents, technologists, researchers, and policy makers.

The goal of these listening sessions were to gather input, ideas, and engage in conversations that will help the Department shape a vision for AI policy that is inclusive of cutting-edge research and practices while also informed by the opportunities and risks.

Blog Posts

Need More Info?

Contact ed.tech@ed.gov with questions.

Please Include "OET AI" in the Subject Line

For a print-out and summary of the Artificial Intelligence Initiative, please review our AI One-pager

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Artificial Intelligence - Office of Educational Technology

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OET is working to develop policies and supports focused on the effective, safe, and fair use of AI-enabled educational technology.

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AI and education - Guidance for policymakers - 376709eng.pdf

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AI and education - Guidance for policymakers - 376709eng.pdf

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The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023 - YouTube

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The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023 - YouTube

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Why Literacy Skills are Key to Success in the AI Era

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Why Literacy Skills are Key to Success in the AI Era

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A lot of teachers think that ChatGPT will damage literacy levels.

I do not.

I've even heard people say that it will make students lazy.

In this blog, I will explore why literacy will be vital if students are going to effectively utilise AI in their lives and work.

When I refer to literacy I will be using the broader definition: The ability to read, write, speak, and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world.

The Problem

Some people think that AI tools like ChatGPT will make students lazy because they will become reliant on them to do their written work.

This will lead to students leaving education lacking basic literacy skills because AI can just do it for them.

The thing is unless students have high literacy skills to start with, they aren't going to get very far with a generative AI tool.

Anyway, literacy levels are terrible already. So what are we trying to safeguard here?

The question is:

Are we going to allow students to leave the education system with low AI skills as a consequence of inadequate literacy skills or is this an opportunity to simultaneously increase their literacy levels while developing their AI skills?

The Connection Between Literacy and Artificial Intelligence

The truth is that the effective use of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT requires high levels of literacy. For it to work well, it needs clear and concise language to produce accurate responses. Poor literacy skills can lead to ambiguous communication, which can confuse the AI's output.

An AI LLM is designed to interpret natural language. Inadequate literacy skills can result in grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and syntax issues that may compromise the AI LLM's ability to comprehend and respond to user queries accurately.

Communicating effectively with an LLM is becoming a major life skill. Those who can do it will survive in the AI revolution, and those who can do it well will thrive.

Why?

Large language models are designed to understand human language and then output a response. So, this means that we will be able to simply explain what we would like to happen or like to be created and AI will be able to do it.

Think this is in the future? Think again.

ChatGPT can produce computer coding simply by asking it. Check out my example here.

Runway video editor can edit a video to a very high level and all you have to do is type the instructions e.g. "Cut the clip at 1 minute 10 seconds and make that clip black and white."

Midjourney can produce high-quality images based on your written instructions. The image of the astronaut near the top of this newsletter was created with Midjourney.

Some tools will create animations, lesson plans, videos, instructions etc simply by asking it with written words.

What does this mean?

In the AI revolution, creative skills are literacy skills.

It is our argument that literacy will become even more important, not less important.

By the way, the examples I have given above are available right now. What's to come in the future will continue to change the world.

In BoredGeekSociety's recent Medium post, he explored the work that is being done to connect LLMs to the physical world. Think robots with a 'ChatGPT' brain. The 'Internet of Things' is about to reach a completely new level.

Melissa McBride, the founder of Sophia School, is also working on integrating LLMs into the metaverse, giving users the ability to create new worlds by simply speaking them into existence.

In conclusion, literacy is as important as it ever has been. I would argue more important.

The false dichotomy of literacy versus AI is a red herring.

Both are now intimately connected.

So my practical question to you is:

How can we boost levels of literacy in our students using AI and how in return can we prepare students for the AI revolution with literacy skills?

Be sure to check out The AI Classroom book to learn how to stay ahead of the curve with artificial intelligence in education!

Want to read more about artificial intelligence in education? Check out these resources:

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Unlocking the Power of AI: Why Literacy Skills are Key to Success in the AI Era

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In this article, we explore the critical role of literacy skills in the effective use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, and how educators can use AI to boost students' literacy levels. With examples of how AI can be used to enhance communication, creativity, and problem-solving, this article offers practical insights for preparing students for the AI revolution.

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We launched the first ever prompt hacking competition designed to enhance AI safety and education by challenging participants to outsmart large language models from May 5th to June 3rd! The competition featured 10 increasingly difficult levels of prompt hacking defenses and the chance to win over $35,000 in prizes!

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Learn Prompting: Your Guide to Communicating with AI

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Learn Prompting is the largest and most comprehensive course in prompt engineering available on the internet, with over 60 content modules, translated into 9 languages, and a thriving community.

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How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? | MLA Style Center

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How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? | MLA Style Center

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The MLA's method for citing sources uses a template of core elements-standardized criteria that writers can use to evaluate sources and create works-cited-list entries based on that evaluation. That new technologies like ChatGPT emerge is a key reason why the MLA has adopted this approach to citation-to give writers flexibility to apply the style when they encounter new types of sources. In what follows, we offer recommendations for citing generative AI, defined as a tool that "can analyze or summarize content from a huge set of information, including web pages, books and other writing available on the internet, and use that data to create original new content" (Weed).

You should

cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it

acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location

take care to vet the secondary sources it cites (see example 5 below for more details)

See below for specific examples. And keep in mind: the MLA template of core elements is meant to provide flexibility in citation. So if you find a rationale to modify these recommendations in your own citations, we encourage you to do so. We've opened this post up for commenting, so let us know what you think and how you're using and citing generative AI tools!

Using the MLA Template

Author

We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author. This recommendation follows the policies developed by various publishers, including the MLA's journal PMLA.

Title of Source

Describe what was generated by the AI tool. This may involve including information about the prompt in the Title of Source element if you have not done so in the text.

Title of Container

Use the Title of Container element to name the AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT).

Version

Name the version of the AI tool as specifically as possible. For example, the examples in this post were developed using ChatGPT 3.5, which assigns a specific date to the version, so the Version element shows this version date.

Publisher

Name the company that made the tool.

Date

Give the date the content was generated.

Location

Give the general URL for the tool.

Example 1: Paraphrasing Text

Passage in Source

Paraphrased in Your Prose

While the green light in The Great Gatsby might be said to chiefly symbolize four main things: optimism, the unattainability of the American dream, greed, and covetousness ("Describe the symbolism"), arguably the most important-the one that ties all four themes together-is greed.

Works-Cited-List Entry

"Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald" prompt. The Great Gatsby ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

Example 2: Quoting Text

Passage in Source

Quoted in Your Prose

When asked to describe the symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby, ChatGPT provided a summary about optimism, the unattainability of the American dream, greed, and covetousness. However, when further prompted to cite the source on which that summary was based, it noted that it lacked "the ability to conduct research or cite sources independently" but that it could "provide a list of scholarly sources related to the symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby " ("In 200 words").

Works-Cited-List Entry

"In 200 words, describe the symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby" follow-up prompt to list sources. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 9 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

While we've provided fairly detailed descriptions of the prompts above, a more general one (e.g., Symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby prompt) could be used, since you are describing something that mimics a conversation, which could have various prompts along the way.

Example 3: Citing Creative Visual Works

If you are incorporating an AI-generated image in your work, you will likely need to create a caption for it following the guidelines in of the MLA Handbook. Use a description of the prompt, followed by the AI tool, version, and date created:

Fig. 1. "Pointillist painting of a sheep in a sunny field of blue flowers" prompt, DALL-E, version 2, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, labs.openai.com/.

You can use this same information if you choose to create a works-cited-list entry instead of including the full citation in the caption (see MLA Handbook, sec. 1.7).

Example 4: Quoting Creative Textual Works

If you ask a generative AI tool to create a work, like a poem, how you cite it will depend on whether you assign a title to it. Let's say, for example, you ask ChatGPT to write a villanelle titled "The Sunflower" that-you guessed it!-describes a sunflower and then quote it in your text. Your works-cited-list entry might look like this:

"The Sunflower" villanelle about a sunflower. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

If you did not title the work, incorporate part of or all of the first line into the description of the work in the Title of Source element:

"Upon the shore . . ." Shakespearean sonnet about seeing the ocean. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

For guidance on using descriptions and text from the work itself in the Title of Source element, see the MLA Handbook, 5.28 and 5.29.

Example 5: Citing Secondary Sources Used by an AI Tool

You should also take care to vet the secondary sources cited by a generative AI tool-with the caveat that AI tools do not always cite sources or, when they do, do not always indicate precisely what a given source has contributed. If you cite an AI summary that includes sources and do not go on to consult those sources yourself, we recommend that you acknowledge secondary sources in your work.

For example, let's say that you ask Bing AI to explain the concept of the political unconscious, citing sources, and it provides the following answer:

Let's say that you then decide to quote from the final sentence. You need to click through to the source listed in the note in order to get more information than just a URL for the source. There, you will read the following:

Now, you can treat Oxford Reference as your source since Bing AI was merely a research conduit to the source (see MLA Handbook 5.34 for more information). If for some reason you want to treat a source cited in a generative AI tool as an indirect source-and you know it is, in fact, the source for the information provided by the AI, follow the guidance in section 6.77 of the MLA Handbook.

Note

1. At the time of writing this post, ChatGPT doesn't have a built-in feature to create a unique URL to the conversation. However, an outside tool like the Chrome extension ShareGPT can generate such a link. If you use that type of outside tool, include the unique URL that the tool generates instead of the general URL.

DALL-E allows users to download the AI-generated images they create or generate a publicly-available URL that leads to an image. If you choose to create a shareable link for an image you generate with DALL-E (or other similar AI image generators), include that unique URL that leads to the image instead of the general URL.

Works Cited

MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021. MLA Handbook Plus, 2021, mlahandbookplus.org/.

Weed, Julie. "Can ChatGPT Plan Your Vacation?" The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/travel/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-travel-vacation.html.

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How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? | MLA Style Center

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The MLA's method for citing sources uses a template of core elements-standardized criteria that writers can use to evaluate sources and create works-cited-list entries based on that evaluation. That new technologies like ChatGPT emerge is a key reason why the MLA has adopted this approach to citation-to give writers flexibility to apply the style when ...

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Academic integrity in the age of AI | Turnitin

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Academic integrity in the age of AI | Turnitin

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The recent surge of text generative AI has everyone in the education world talking. Think pieces, blogs, and social media are full of questions with no clear answers, yet educators are already facing these issues in classrooms. No longer a potential issue in the future, AI-generated text is present and likely closer than many educators would prefer.

Still, consider the adaptations that educators have made successfully in the past. The shift to using a search engine to locate information online rather than the card catalog to locate print text shifted the way research skills are taught in the not too distant past. AI-generated text is the next big shift in the education world. Some clear challenges have emerged with its relative ease of use, yet the potential for good instructional practices is clearly there.

Let's seize these opportunities to truly make our teaching and learning match the world our students inhabit.

As AI evolves, so will our resources, so bookmark this page and plan to revisit it regularly for helpful information and strategies.

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Resources for educators in search of academic integrity solutions in instruction and assessment when faced with student usage of artificial intelligence tools.

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ChatGPT: What Kinds of Questions Get Good Answers? A User's Guide - Bloomberg

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ChatGPT: What Kinds of Questions Get Good Answers? A User's Guide - Bloomberg

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Four Questions to Consider on using ChatGPT in Education – George Couros

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Four Questions to Consider on using ChatGPT in Education – George Couros

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This is a good thing.

You might also notice that many "experts" on AI are emerging, but no one can truly know the full potential of what AI will bring to our world. Many people sharing strategies aren't necessarily experts in AI, as much as they probably are just great at learning and becoming adaptable to new opportunities for learning. That is an essential skill that takes time and energy to develop.

But as quickly as ChatGPT has arrived, one step behind was blocking it within education and in schools.

About four seconds after the winter break was completed in January, a friend of mine posted this on his Instagram story:

Many decisions for what is blocked in education come from a lack of information, not an abundance. It is easy to say, "There is no value for 'this' in school," which can often be a disguise for, "I don't understand this new technology, so let's just say it is bad, or pretend it doesn't exist."

But this technology does exist.

Is our focus on kids becoming great learners or becoming good at school?

Things like ChatGPT can have tremendous opportunities for learning and growth, but we have to learn them ourselves to see the potential for what this type of technology can do for learning in education.

Too often, we try to skip to the "teaching" without doing the "learning."

And I am not talking about "learning how to teach" a new tool or idea. I am talking about how to see the benefits and uses of new technology in our own lives and connect those ideas to the different disciplines and content we currently teach.

What I want to try to do today is share with you some ideas that may help with using ChatGPT with your staff for professional learning and ideas to make connections to how it can be used in the classroom. Please feel free to modify and adjust as needed to fit the needs of those you serve.

Starting Point - What are AI and ChatGPT, and how is it different from Google?

I was thinking of how I would answer this question and went into ChatGPT and asked, "What is the difference between ChatGPT and Google?"

This might not have been the best question to ask because this was the answer I received:

"ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, while Google is a search engine and technology company. ChatGPT is a model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt, while Google's services include search, email, cloud storage, and online advertising, among others."

So maybe, this wasn't the best question to ask. So I tried again and asked the following: How can you use ChatGPT, and how does it differ from google search?

Already, the use of this program is forcing me to ask better questions. That is a good thing.

This is the response it gave me:

That is a better answer because I asked a better question.

But the best answer I have heard so far on this topic is from a video by Jaspreet Singh on "5 Ways You Build Wealth With ChatGPT." He says the following:

"What is artificial intelligence and ChatGPT?

Aritificial Intelligence, otherwise known as AI is a digital brain it's a separate brain that can now process and analyze information. You can compare this to the technology that we have now where when you ask something a question like Google, Google will then give you a place where you can find the answer to the question, so if you go to Google and you search "how do I start a popular YouTube channel?," Google will then show you a number of different blog posts where it believes that you can find the answer to your question. Versus artificial intelligence, reads through all the articles on the internet, and then it provides an answer to your question.

ChatGPT is the first extension of artificial intelligence that's available to everybody free of cost. The way that ChatGPT works is you can ask ChatGPT a question, and it will search the Internet and then process all the information that's out there and then spit out an answer for you."

Here is a one-minute clip sharing this and a bit more information as a great starting point for conversation.

As I watched this whole video, I thought about how powerful it would be to watch it in its entirety with staff to start a discussion on this topic. It is focused on the following five questions, and I think there are a lot of takeaways directly connected to education. Jaspreet focused on the five following questions in the video:

Inspired by Jaspreet's video, I thought about four questions that would be great for conversation and exploration to lead during a professional learning day.

Four Questions to Consider on using ChatGPT in Education
1. What are some of the negatives and positives of ChatGPT?
This is a great way to start the conversation by discussing all of the negative implications of this type of technology.

Some of the issues that I have heard already is that the platform is web-based, you have to use an email account to sign up, and it is "free" for now (there's a saying that, "if something is free right now, you are the product!" which is a concern!), amongst other things. Not all of these things can be addressed, but I do think we must have the opportunity to share these and other worries.

One of the many concerns is that this type of technology could lead to "cheating" and students just having ChatGPT write essays for students.

I understand that concern.

For years, I have shared in my presentations that "if you can google the answer to the question on the test, the question is probably not that good in the first place."

It is not that students shouldn't have basic knowledge but that they go beyond those basics. Are we focused on students simply memorizing information or developing wisdom?

One of my favorite quotes on the subject is the following:

Wisdom and deep understanding should be the goal.

So let's return to the original statement; "if you can google the answer to the question on the test, the question is probably not that good in the first place."

Thinking about this question in the context of ChatGPT and writing an essay, if AI can write the essay, are we having students make their own connections and create a deep understanding, or are they giving answers that lack "humanness" in the response?

This "negative" can be turned into an opportunity to revisit what we ask of students and how they share a deep understanding of what they have learned.
2. What are some ways that ChatGPT can be used in our everyday lives?
Before jumping into how to use ChatGPT in education, I think it is a great idea to see the value of it in our own lives.

I saw this TikTok on utilizing ChatGPT in making a dinner menu for kids who are picky eaters, and it was pretty compelling:

@zoltronic
ChatGPT is going to change the world very quickly. #ai #nneaurallink #chatgpt #gpt3 #greenscreenvideo #ai #openai #kosher #naturallanguageprocessing #bot #robot #future

♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys - Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey

Seeing this video, I thought about how I could use this in my own life.

I wanted to train for a half-marathon, so I wanted a schedule. Too often, when I would do an Internet search for training schedules, I would bump into paywalls, hidden documents, or just a bevy of advertisements.

I decided to ask ChatGPT for a half-marathon training schedule for 16 weeks, but only list the last eight weeks of training.

The schedule was pretty good, but I wanted the long runs to be on Sunday and to list all lengths in kilometers instead of miles. It then spits out a schedule, which I then ask to put into a table form, and I have been using it ever since (I am on week 13, and it has been going great!).

What is critical in this scenario is that I had to have some training knowledge (I have run a few marathons before this) to understand if the schedule provided is on the right track. But this process took me about four minutes, versus the HOURS of searching online for something that might fit my criteria.

If I see the value of this type of technology in my everyday life, then it might fit into what I do in my work and classroom.
3. How can we use ChatGPT in our current roles to make our lives easier and improve learning?
As quickly as ChatGPT was blocked in many schools, I also saw many educators sharing ideas on how they could use it to make their work more manageable and, as Jaspreet shared, use this as a "second brain."

Tyler Tarver shared this video on how teachers could use ChatGPT to help build a lesson plan:

What I appreciate about Tarver's video is that he uses the technology to give ideas or even outlines, but identifies the necessity of the teacher knowing the students in the classroom and making modifications based on their needs, as ChatGPT would not be able to do that.
(It was also interesting to see how so many different ideas are being shared on utilizing ChatGPT to save time through creating, like this video on mass-creating content using Canva and Google Sheets.)
In my podcast creation, I have recently done some book reviews and shared my thoughts and insights into what I have learned. As I have been putting together the outlines for the podcast, I have been using ChatGPT to write quick summaries of the books that I can read out.

For example, in a book review of "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz, I asked ChatGPT to do the following:

"Give me a Twitter thread summary of the four agreements in 10 tweets or less."

I used what it shared and, with some modifications, read them in my podcast and provided a reference that I utilized ChatGPT to garner that information.

So how do you know I read the book?

Because I went beyond that summary and broke down specific quotes, what they meant to me, and how I connected the ideas to my own learning.

Through the process, I wanted to model that using this technology for my learning was a time-saver, but I had to go beyond. It saved me a ton of time writing something that would be almost generic sounding and provided more time for deep reflection.

In my opinion, that was time well spent.
4. How can we help students utilize ChatGPT for their learning in and outside of school?
Now that people have spent time seeing the value of something like ChatGPT for their learning, THEN it is time for a conversation on ways that we could have students use this in their learning, in and out of the classroom.

In "Innovate Inside the Box," I shared the following:

If people have sufficient time and access to play around with their learning, they will more likely see how it can be implemented and guided for student learning. It is essential to default to the expertise of your staff in this situation, but provide them with time to a) use the technology themselves and b) have time to explore with their colleagues and team on how they would suggest using it in their own disciplines or roles.

In " The Innovator's Mindset," I wrote the following:

The same is true with adults. I

If it is vital to helping our students, then providing time to explore and create during professional learning opportunities is necessary.

When Khan Academy first came out years ago, many worried it would "replace teachers." I never had that concern.

My thought was if those videos are simply a replication of how people teach, then we should be concerned. But school is more than content and information. Khan Academy never replaced teachers, but it became a supplemental resource in many cases. That is how I see the potential for ChatGPT as a resource or "second brain" that can be utilized but never something that will replace great teachers.

That being said, if time and guidance are not provided for professional learning, this will be seen as a constant fight instead of an opportunity to be embraced.

Never in the history of ever has something gotten better by ignoring it, only by learning and growing to move forward.

In a time of artificial intelligence, wisdom will become more critical than ever. But that wisdom takes time to grow and develop.

For our students and for us.

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Four Questions to Consider on using ChatGPT in Education

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This is a good thing. You might also notice that many "experts" on AI are emerging, but no one can truly know the full potential of what AI will bring to our world. Many people sharing strategies aren't necessarily experts in AI, as much as they probably are just great at learning and becoming adaptable to new opportunities for learning.

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9 Creative Ways to Engage Teen Students With ChatGPT: The More We Use It, the More Possibilities We Discover | BAM! Radio Network

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9 Creative Ways to Engage Teen Students With ChatGPT: The More We Use It, the More Possibilities We Discover | BAM! Radio Network

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ChatGPT Transforms a Classroom and Is ‘M3GAN’ Real? - The New York Times

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ChatGPT Transforms a Classroom and Is ‘M3GAN’ Real? - The New York Times

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ChatGPT Transforms a Classroom and Is ‘M3GAN’ Real?

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Also, why teenagers are buying old digital cameras.

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Artificial intelligence and education - TIE BLOG : Teaching Your Way Around the World

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Artificial intelligence and education - TIE BLOG : Teaching Your Way Around the World

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TIE BLOG : Teaching Your Way Around the World - Sharing stories, expertise, and experiences from international educators around the world

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The hype around ChatGPT is palpable: schools are racing to have staff meetings on it, share resources, and react quickly. After decades of being steadily and collectively formatted by a technology-driven economy and the resultant positivist ideology, peppered with our schizoid relationship with artificial intelligence (the pendulum swings from the feeling that we have to get ahead with artificial intelligence at all costs, to the other extreme of fear and reactivity), ChatGPT leaps out at us as from the dystopian sea of Deep Blue the " big data" craze and the robot Sophia. Remember the excitement and panic around Google search engines and Wikipedia and how much it would change everything? Here we go again ... One can expect references to ChatGPT in conference keynotes for the next few months, speakers having grown tired of videos of robots or fun statistics about computing processing power.

And with these waves of advances in machine learning come the habitual rather hackneyed warnings of how this will change the face of employment, education and even what it means to be human. Such crystal-ball gazing can be quite serious, but it can also become ridiculous, always couched in norms and generalisations. There is the idea that educators should be doing something about it, changing something, getting ready for the future, or accepting that the future has already happened, and this needs to be done quickly and so on.

I don't mean to denigrate the serious challenges and opportunities that technology creates (and always has as it has evolved historically), I write about it at length and seriously in Educating for the Twenty-First Century: Seven Global Challenges, but I do think that a pinch of salt here and there is not a bad thing either.

Here are my four thoughts on ChatGPT at this early stage:

Artificial intelligence should be where thinking starts, not where it ends. (that phrase comes from my colleague Yoni Osman). Those who still hang on to the idea of banning technology in schools are fighting a losing battle. I once heard a rather sad story of a child being told off by a teacher for correcting him in class having accessed Google on her phone to verify what was said. Is the goal to access knowledge or to hide it? Curriculum has to be relevant, and the world we are living in is assisted by technology. Sometimes I wonder if cell phones have not replaced parts of our neocortical architecture. It might not be what we want to see happening to us as humans, but trying to create a romantic garden where there is no technology and algorithms such as ChatGPT are closed is absurd. On the contrary, algorithms save time. This does not mean that we should stop reading or doing research, it just means that such arcane intellectual and academic pursuits need to be accompanied with technology in more colourful ways. Students can use ChatGPT for certain in-class supervised tasks, they can ask it to give feedback on the occasional essay, but they need to use their faculties of discernment to discuss what is being created.

The death of the search engine. One can imagine that ChatGPT will replace Google searches. Unfortunately, most users of search engines skim quickly through the first items that appear, so having artificial intelligence spew the answer out to you or create a narrative to your question instead is merely an accentuation of the same linearity. Discerning scholars might sieve through search engine responses, using their background knowledge and critical thinking to select the best sources, and they will have to do the same with ChatGPT, scrutinising it.

The sterility of the artificial voice. As powerful as ChatGPT might be, and we should not underestimate its deep learning capacity (in a few months it will be much more powerful), when you read the texts it produces, somewhere, in the distant recesses of the prose, is a slightly flat monotonous machine-like sterility, resonant of the computer Hal's metallic, depressed voice in Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. ChatGPT might sound human, but in that case, it sounds like a fairly dull human. And there are errors of course because of the automaticity of its understanding of semantics. Ultimately, expression is about style and voice, which is what I encourage in my philosophy students' writing: give personal anecdotes, let the reader hear your voice. Perhaps it is a good thing that artificial intelligence is competing with us, it pushes us to bring out more vivacity, originality and personality in what we say.

Plagiarism is only as big a threat as we allow it to be. One obvious reaction to this development in technology is to fear that students will no longer bother to write essays at home, or even design projects, since they will simply ask ChatGPT to do it for them. This merely reinforces the problem of extended pieces of homework. As soon as we ask students to do substantive pieces of work at home, there are a host of ways of plagiarising, getting others to do the work, using pre-packaged prompts and so on. I always have my students write every essay in class. At home they read and revise. Teachers who are fond of giving important and lengthy homework to students might have to rethink that strategy. And let's not forget the Pandora's box of assessment reliability problems that homework releases anyway, including issues of unequal work conditions at home: one of the reasons why schools exist in the first place is to create fair and equal learning conditions for all students. For coursework assignments, students might plagiarise and plagiarism-detection software will not pick it up. However, the irony of ironies is that ChatGPT cannot lie, so all we need to do is ask it if it wrote the piece of writing in question, and it will tell us.

All in all, the purpose of education is to live a better life, and this is achieved through the development of knowledge, aesthetics and virtues. Using artificial intelligence to accelerate processes and find solutions should not be a problem, but it will be our fault if we let artificial intelligence carve out the end of our thinking and not the beginning. All the texts in the world written by ChatGPT will not make us any wiser, and we have to teach our students to integrate words, ideas and values for themselves, for it is with this truly natural, inner language that they will define and understand the world, and the world will be as interesting as the depth of concepts are to describe it, no more, no less. As the great Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world". May those limits be the ones we choose, not the ones chosen for us by an algorithm.

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Artificial intelligence and education - TIE BLOG : Teaching Your Way Around the World

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The hype around ChatGPT is palpable: schools are racing to have staff meetings on it, share resources, and react quickly.

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Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT—Stephen Wolfram Writings

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Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT—Stephen Wolfram Writings

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Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT

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Accessing Wolfram|Alpha’s computational knowledge with ChatGPT--an ideal combination of precise computation with human-like expression of ideas. Stephen Wolfram explains how.

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ChatGPT: A Must-See Before the Semester Begins | Faculty Focus

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ChatGPT: A Must-See Before the Semester Begins | Faculty Focus

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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I have seen friends on Facebook create decent songs and stunning artistic creations with little knowledge of music or art, all after spending a bit of time getting to know an AI art or music generator. But since the grammar assistants in my word processors often flag what is already correct and miss what I wish they should have caught, I've never felt AI writing was advancing very quickly.

And then I met ChatGPT. The Facebook teaching page for my university has taken off on the topic, so I took a deep dive into what it can do. I've seen it create (in a flash) movie scripts and comic strips, sonnets and grant proposals, graduate course syllabi and lessons. It can execute math problems, showing all its work with written explanations. Nearly any writing prompt one might assign to be completed outside of class (with a few notable exceptions) can be written pretty well, quickly, at no cost, and undetectable by our current plagiarism software by anyone who takes a little time to learn the nuances of ChatGPT. I am spending the day after Christmas writing this because I don't want anyone to lament, "Why didn't anyone warn me about this sooner?"

This coming semester were you planning on asking students to explain the difference between operant and classical conditioning, compare and contrast the writing styles of Octavia Butler and Louise Erdrich, write a lab report, analyze a speech, create an LLC, or design a brochure? ChatGPT has them covered.

Let me be clear about my first goal; I desperately hope that I can convince you to take an hour to get a feel for what ChatGPT is and what it is capable of right away. I've collected some ideas and resources to get you started. A few will walk away from this exercise thinking, "What a relief. Nothing needs to be modified in the courses I teach; ChatGPT will not impact my instruction, but I'm glad I can converse about it." But I suspect the vast majority, and especially those who teach online courses, will recognize that this is a game-changer that may require substantial course revisions before the new semester.

But I have a second, more important mission once you've taken a look, perhaps worried about how to approach this technology, and wondered how swiftly AI is going improve and expand. I want to beg you not to turn to increased punishment, surveillance, and control, and instead consider how this fascinating turn of events might be a reason for rejoicing. Might this be an opportunity to turn away from assembly line efficiency and toward a model where we help students use AI to extend their capabilities, allowing them to pursue interests and solve wicked problems? Could this be a chance to design a model where students wouldn't dream of using AI unethically or allow it to steal their learning, a model where educators find more meaning and purpose in their work as well?

At a time when it may feel like AI is stripping away our humanity, I wonder if it might be possible that it is handing us an opportunity to work with students far more than we talk at them. What if students bring strengths, interests, technical knowledge, and comfort in thinking outside the box and we pair that with our own substantial learning and talents and then bring what AI can contribute into the mix? What could we accomplish then?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that basic writing will now be generated by AI initially, tweaked with a few additional prompts, and then polished by the human writer. Or for more creative, personal, analytic, or cutting-edge writing, the work will start with the human writer and be polished in the end by AI. We'd all continue to do a lot of "writing to learn"-writing to help us think, brainstorm, and make sense of our thoughts and feelings, with no desire to use AI. Would all this be so terrible? Already when I write I use loads of "assistants." Word checks my spelling and grammar, and I use its thesaurus to find the ideal word. Google helps me fact-check. A friend might make suggestions. Citation generators help with APA style. If I am writing something that follows conventions I am less familiar with, such as a book proposal or grant, I look at others' examples. Is any of this "cheating?" How might what constitutes as "cheating" change in the age of AI?

My hope is that this shake-up will force us to address the underlying problem-that while humans are naturally curious and will often pursue out-of-school learning with great fervor, much in-school learning feels trivial and tedious. The pandemic brought even more students to the conclusion that much of the educational endeavor is not worth the considerable amount of time it requires. But as I noted in The nail in the coffin: How AI could be the impetus to reimagine education, we could "enchant learning in higher ed in such a way that people flock to it when they need to be energized, when they need a balm, when they are trying to figure out their why, when they have burning questions they want support in pursuing."

What might this look like? Students would need to direct their own learning with our guidance; I suspect that's a non-negotiable prerequisite for learning that beckons. We may need to let go of our attachment to a common curriculum marched through in a specified order. When a student is pursuing learning, almost nothing can stop them. When they are forced, developing the intrinsic motivation needed for quality learning is a tall order. What could we imagine if we move beyond our fears that teaching in our particular field might need to drastically change?

We would spend far more time developing information literacy, teamwork, research skills, study skills, and metacognitive skills so that students wouldn't be so dependent on us and could engage in more self-directed learning. We'd have loads of discussions on what constitutes ethical use of AI in this brave new world and ethics in general. What do we want our world to be like? How can we move in that direction?

While foundational knowledge is required for higher-order thinking, we often focus primarily or almost exclusively on the foundational. In this new paradigm, we would point students toward the appropriate modules to develop that foundational knowledge, and we'd move students as soon as possible into problem/project/case-based learning, much of it personalized and experiential or field-based. We would be mostly working with, working alongside, facilitating and supporting, and letting AI do some of the heavy lifting.

What if a key task for more expert students was to create modules for more novice students with your support? These students would select meaty resources, devise interesting ways to engage others with those resources, and create fascinating and interactive modules that build on what we know about how to make learning stick. The more expert students could learn to work with the novices to clear up confusion, discuss nuances of understanding, and so forth.

That's my vision. Running with robots is a wonderful collection of other possible visions, some real and some imagined. While it is focused on high school, the majority of the concepts would be transferrable to higher education. What is your vision? If your goal was to make learning so meaningful, worthwhile, and alluring that students wouldn't dream of cheating themselves AND make your own job deeply satisfying, what would that look like? What role might you play in getting this conversation started at your institution? I'm going to facilitate a faculty learning community on reimagining higher education; perhaps you'll do the same.
Cynthia Alby has spent most of her career immersed in "avid cross-disciplinary idea synthesizing." Her primary research question is, "How might we re-enchant learning in order to help faculty and students flourish?' She joined Georgia College in 2001, where she is a Professor of Teacher Education. She recently co-authored a practical book on course design for changing times: Learning that matters: A field guide to course design for transformative education. In addition, for nearly 20 years she has helped to develop faculty from across Georgia through the "Governor's Teaching Fellows Program" at the Louise McBee Institute for Higher Education at UGA. References:
Alby, C. (2022, December 21). ChatGPT: Understanding the new landscape and short-term solutions [web log]. Retrieved from https://learningthatmatters.weebly.com/resources.html.

Alby, C. (2022, December 23). The nail in the coffin: How AI could be the impetus to reimagine education [web log]. Retrieved from https://learningthatmatters.weebly.com/resources.html.

Toppo, G., & Tracy, J. (2021). Running with robots: The American high school's third century. The MIT Press.

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ChatGPT: A Must-See Before the Semester Begins | Faculty Focus

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I have seen friends on Facebook create decent songs and stunning artistic creations with little knowledge of music or art, all after spending a bit of time getting to know an AI art or music generator.

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A Teacher's Prompt Guide to ChatGPT aligned with 'What Works Best'.pdf - Google Drive

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A Teacher's Prompt Guide to ChatGPT aligned with 'What Works Best'.pdf - Google Drive

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A Teacher's Prompt Guide to ChatGPT aligned with 'What Works Best'.pdf

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We gave ChatGPT a college-level microbiology quiz. It aced it. - Big Think

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We gave ChatGPT a college-level microbiology quiz. It aced it. - Big Think

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You wouldn't know it from interacting with Siri or those technical-support, call-center robots, but artificial intelligence has made some incredible advances in a short amount of time. Earlier this year, the tech world was abuzz with various generative AI programs that could, on command, create entirely new, never-before-existing images or works of art.

Today, the tech world is abuzz again over ChatGPT, a chat bot that is said to be the most advanced ever made. Just how advanced is ChatGPT? It can create poems, songs, and even computer code. On Twitter, Thomas Ptacek showed that it could convincingly construct a passage of text on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, in the voice of the King James Bible.

In my opinion, that is truly remarkable. But as a scientist, I want to know more about ChatGPT's abilities. Can it answer hard questions about difficult topics? Can it synthesize information? Can it analyze an experiment?

To find out more, I subjected ChatGPT to a microbiology quiz. The questions I asked would be appropriate for a final exam for an undergraduate biology major who just completed an introductory course in microbiology. Note that ChatGPT tends to drone on a bit, so I truncated many of its answers for the sake of brevity.
Q1. In two sentences or less, explain the difference between Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria.
A1. Gram positive bacteria have a thick peptidoglycan layer in their cell walls, while Gram negative bacteria have a thin peptidoglycan layer. This difference in the cell wall structure of the bacteria leads to different staining properties when they are exposed to crystal violet and iodine, the two dyes used in the Gram staining procedure.
Grade: Mostly correct. The ChatGPT failed to mention that Gram positive bacteria have a single membrane, while Gram negative bacteria have two membranes. (This is probably the more important distinction between the bacteria.) It also is incorrect about the dye; the correct dyes are crystal violet and safranin. (Iodine is used to "fix" the crystal violet dye.) Q2. In three words or less, transformation, transduction, and conjugation are all examples of what?
A2. Genetic exchange in bacteria.
Grade: Correct (if we forgive the word "in"). I am impressed by this, as it shows that ChatGPT is capable of identifying the most important common feature of these microbiological processes. Transformation occurs when a bacterium incorporates DNA from its environment; transduction occurs when a virus transfers genes from one bacterium to another; and conjugation occurs when one bacterium injects DNA directly into another bacterium. All of them are forms of genetic transfer. Q3. Complete the simile. Prions are to protein as viroids are to what?
A3. Prions are to protein as viroids are to RNA. [Truncated]
Grade: Correct. I am very impressed by this. It understands similes. (Seriously?!) Prions are infectious proteins (one form of which causes mad cow disease), and viroids are infectious RNA molecules that cause disease in plants. Q4. An emergency room patient presents with a terrible headache and stiff neck. The doctor orders a spinal tap to collect cerebrospinal fluid. A Gram stain of the CSF reveals the presence of Gram negative diplococci. What is the diagnosis?
A4. Based on the information you provided, the Gram stain of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shows the presence of Gram-negative diplococci, which are bacteria that are typically oval-shaped and occur in pairs. This finding is consistent with the diagnosis of meningitis. [Truncated]
Grade: Correct. Q5. A microbiologist does a plate count to determine the concentration of bacteria in a test tube. He performs six ten-fold dilutions and puts 1 mL of the final dilution on a Petri plate. 205 colonies were observed on the Petri plate. What was the original concentration of bacteria in the test tube?
[A5 is long but worth reading in its entirety. A screenshot is below.]

Grade: 100% correct. (My jaw is on the floor.) Q6. In five words or less, what is the point of Koch's postulates?
A6. Establish causality between microbe and disease.
Grade: Nailed it (again, forgiving the word "and"). Q7. A mutation occurs in the promoter region of a gene so that sigma factor can no longer recognize or bind to it. In one sentence, what will happen to expression of the gene?
A7. Expression of the gene will be decreased because sigma factor cannot recognize or bind to the promoter region.
Grade: Correct. Q8. A scientist wants to clone a gene into a plasmid. How should he decide which restriction enzyme to use?
A8. There are several factors to consider when choosing a restriction enzyme for cloning a gene into a plasmid. The first and most important factor is the compatibility of the restriction enzyme with the plasmid vector. The restriction enzyme must produce compatible sticky ends that can be ligated to the sticky ends of the plasmid vector, allowing the gene to be inserted into the plasmid. The scientist should also consider the size of the gene and the restriction enzyme's recognition site, as well as the presence of any potential restriction sites within the gene itself. [Truncated]
Grade: Correct. Q9. A natural killer cell encounters a somatic cell that lacks MHC I molecules on its surface. In one sentence, what is the likely outcome?
A9. If a natural killer cell encounters a somatic cell that lacks MHC I molecules on its surface, the natural killer cell is likely to kill the somatic cell.
Grade: Correct. (A natural killer cell - also called an NK cell - is sort of like the "secret police" of the immune system. They monitor body cells, asking to see "identification" (MHC I molecules). If a cell cannot produce that identification, it is killed on the spot.) Q10. A scientist wants to test the efficacy of a new antibiotic. He infects ten rats with Salmonella and administers the antibiotic to all ten rats. All of them recover. What is the flaw in this experiment?
A10. One potential flaw in this experiment is that the scientist only used ten rats. This is a relatively small sample size, and it is possible that the results of the experiment are not representative of the population as a whole. It is generally recommended to use a larger sample size in experiments in order to increase the reliability and validity of the results. Additionally, the experiment should include a control group of rats that do not receive the antibiotic in order to compare the effects of the antibiotic with the effects of no treatment.
Grade: Correct. (Though, I don't think the comment about the rats being insufficiently representative of the population is relevant here - this isn't an epidemiology study.)
ChatGPT blows away the microbiology quiz

I went into this project as a total skeptic. I was completely certain that I could ask ChatGPT questions that would be far too difficult - not because the content is hard, but because my questions required that the AI demonstrate fairly specialized knowledge, an ability to synthesize that knowledge, an ability to be concise in its responses, and an ability to construct a mathematical solution to a microbiology word problem. With the exception of Q1, ChatGPT passed with flying colors. If I were grading the quiz, I would give ChatGPT a 95% - which is far better than what most human students likely would get.

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We gave ChatGPT a college-level microbiology quiz. It blew the quiz away.

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You wouldn't know it from interacting with Siri or those technical-support, call-center robots, but artificial intelligence has made some incredible advances in a short amount of time. Earlier this year, the tech world was abuzz with various generative AI programs that could, on command, create entirely new, never-before-existing images or works of art.

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Teaching History/Social Studies in the Era of AI Writing Tools | Learning as I go: Experiences, reflections, lessons learned

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Teaching History/Social Studies in the Era of AI Writing Tools | Learning as I go: Experiences, reflections, lessons learned

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Learning as I go: Experiences, reflections, lessons learned

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Interactive digital tools have been shaping and reshaping the way K-12 students engage with history and social studies materials for decades. Multimodal historical timelines, videos, podcasts, digital collections of primary sources, engaging games and simulations, 3D modeling tools, and other types of interactive technologies offer exciting new ways for students to explore historical information and make connections between the past, present, and future.

Now comes ChatGPT - an interactive artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses natural language processing to generate concise responses to user questions in seconds. It can provide instant access to information, write work emails and press releases, brainstorm creative ideas for parties, write code, compose poetry, solve math problems, balance science equations, explain concepts for different developmental ages, and do many other tasks for you with ease.

But, ChatGPT is not just another example of an interactive digital tool remaking how history and social studies can be taught to students in elementary, middle, and high schools; it is a direct challenge to teachers and students to rethink and re-envision the roles of research and writing in the history/social studies classroom.

Look what happened when we posed a history-based focus question about the influence of the Roman Republic on our modern-day United States government to the ChatGPT system - a question that comes directly from the Massachusetts History & Social Science Curriculum Framework. The system generated a concise, readable, textbook-style response (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Screenshot of ChatGPT Response to "How did the Roman Republic influence the United States' modern-day government?"

Similarly, when we asked ChatGPT to respond to a key focus question about the separation of powers in the United States government, it produced a well-written, easy-to-understand text (see figure 2).

Figure 2. Screenshot of ChatGPT Response to "How does the Separation of Powers Function Within the United States Government?"

With this type of information access, do students need to conduct their own research or write their own papers?

With the release of ChatGPT, some educators and journalists have already proclaimed that the "essay is dead" (e.g., Marche, 2022) and even have gone so far as to pronounce "The End of High-School English" (e.g., Herman, 2022).

Why should students do research and write papers when they can just ask an AI system to do that activity for them?

Let's take a closer look at the word "research." Taken apart, it can be read as "re-search" meaning "to look again." That is what historians do all time, examine and re-examine historical information and evidence to revise and update explanations of historical events.

Similarly, writing is not a matter of summarizing information. It is a process of generating new knowledge (new to the world or new to the writer), deepening thinking about a topic, and composing words to communicate with others. In history and social studies, writing offers students ways to connect people and events - often from long ago and far away - to their own lives, experiences, and communities. Students' writing forges connections between past, present, and future and it can help students envision themselves as history-makers whose decisions and choices matter. Writing in history and social studies can take many forms, from expository to persuasive to creative. In every case, students give their ideas and perspectives a sense of permanence and importance as they commit words to paper or screens.

So, what does this mean for students in history and social studies classes who might be drawn to the ease of asking AI writing tools to do their research and writing for them?

Students must learn how to become HISTORIANS and WRITERS, not simply how to research information and summarize it in writing. To do this, students need opportunities to interrogate what it means to be a historian and a writer. They need guidance on how to find and critically examine historical information and evidence. They need opportunities to break free from the 5-paragraph essay to uncover the purpose and intellectual benefits of writing. And, they need open-ended learning experiences that allow them to construct their own thinking and learning.

Here is an example of what that might look like when students examine the history of the sugar and spice trade in a Global History course. Spices came into high demand in European societies during the time period 1000-1513. Traders traveled across the globe to find these goods - but why were these goods so popular? And how did the trade of these goods influence individuals, communities, and societies throughout history?

While ChatGPT might be able to answer these questions in a textbook-style response, students can dive deeper. They can look for primary and secondary sources that provide evidence of the use of sugar and spices in different regions, continents, and cultures throughout history. They can critically evaluate historical sketches, photographs, audio recordings, and other types of media presentations of these commodities (see the Illustration of a sugarcane plant in a collection of medical texts, Italy (Salerno), c. 1280-1350: Egerton MS 747, f. 106r on the Medieval Manuscripts Blog). They can try to uncover like a historian would, people's firsthand experiences with sugar, spices, and the trade of these commodities in different eras and countries. And, then they can build an interactive map (on Google MyMaps or Padlet) or multimodal timeline, and, like a writer, present a deep interrogation of the influence of the sugar and spice trade throughout history and on present-day society (something ChatGPT cannot do - see figure 3). In this learning plan, inspired by Marina Amicizia, a history/social studies teacher licensure candidate at our college, students do the analytical and creative work of historians and writers - curating, evaluating, and synthesizing information into new forms of text.

Figure 3. Screenshot of ChatGPT Response to "Draw a Map of the Sugar Trade Throughout History."

In this learning plan, you can see how information retrieval, made quick and efficient with ChatGPT, is shifted to information curation and analysis.

The AI writing tool can free students from spending time trying to find basic, textbook-style information online (and potentially getting lost in the process) so they can spend more time thinking like historians and acting like writers. Of course, this does not mean that students should trust whatever any AI writing tool produces as true and credible information (see Trust, 2022 ChatGPT & Education). OpenAI, the designer of ChatGPT, openly admits that the tool may provide harmful, biased, misleading, and false information, especially when asking about anything that happened after 2021 since ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet and the data used to build the ChatGPT database was pulled prior to 2021. This makes the need for information literacy skills - essential for historians and writers - more important than ever.

Ultimately, AI writing tools, like ChatGPT, are simply just tools. They are tools that present information. They will not replace teachers, but they might spark a rethinking of what teaching really is and can be. With these interactive digital tools, teaching does not need to consist of simply presenting information that students then summarize on paper or a worksheet. Instead, teaching can be a means of empowering students to creatively construct their own knowledge, experiences, and understandings of the world and to rethink and re-envision research and writing in the era of AI writing tools.

Google Drive Folder with High Res Images: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18mKZl5P4EqM2BJKxBzH_MymcQWsIa92a?usp=sharing
Author Bios
Torrey Trust, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Learning Technology in the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship and teaching focus on how technology shapes educator and student learning. Specifically, Dr. Trust studies how educators engage with digitally enhanced professional learning networks (PLNs), how emerging pedagogical tools (e.g., HyperDocs), practices (e.g., Making), and technologies (e.g., 3D printers, augmented reality) facilitate new learning experiences, and how to design and use open educational resources (OERs). Dr. Trust served as a professional learning network leader for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) for five years, including a two-year term as the President of the Teacher Education Network from 2016 to 2018. In 2018, Dr. Trust was selected as a recipient of the ISTE Making IT Happen Award, which "honors outstanding educators and leaders who demonstrate extraordinary commitment, leadership, courage, and persistence in improving digital learning opportunities for students." www.torreytrust.com

Robert W. Maloy is a senior lecturer in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he coordinates the history teacher education program and co-directs the TEAMS Tutoring Project, a community engagement/service learning initiative through which university students provide academic tutoring to culturally and linguistically diverse students in public schools throughout the Connecticut River Valley region of western Massachusetts. His research focuses on technology and educational change, teacher education, democratic teaching, and student learning. He is co-author of Transforming Learning with New Technologies (4th edition); Kids Have All the Write Stuff: Revised and Updated for a Digital Age; Wiki Works: Teaching Web Research and Digital Literacy in History and Humanities Classrooms; We, the Students and Teachers: Teaching Democratically in the History and Social Studies Classroom; Ways of Writing with Young Kids: Teaching Creativity and Conventions Unconventionally; Kids Have All the Write Stuff: Inspiring Your Child to Put Pencil to Paper; The Essential Career Guide to Becoming a Middle and High School Teacher; Schools for an Information Age; and Partnerships for Improving Schools.

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Teaching History/Social Studies in the Era of AI Writing Tools

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Interactive digital tools have been shaping and reshaping the way K-12 students engage with history and social studies materials for decades. Multimodal historical timelines, videos, podcasts, digital collections of primary sources, engaging games and simulations, 3D modeling tools, and other types of interactive technologies offer exciting new ways for students to explore historical information and make connections between the past, present, and future.

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Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data in teaching and learning for educators

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Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data in teaching and learning for educators

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Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data in teaching and learning for educators - Publications Office of the EU

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Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture

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Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data in teaching and learning for educators - Publications Office of the EU

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Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data in teaching and learning for educators

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Scott Thornbury’s “E is for E coursebook- 10 years later. – samuELTgravell

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Scott Thornbury’s “E is for E coursebook- 10 years later. – samuELTgravell

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UNESCO

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ChatGPT: Teachers Weigh In on How to Manage the New AI Chatbot (Opinion)

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ChatGPT: Teachers Weigh In on How to Manage the New AI Chatbot (Opinion)

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ChatGPT: Teachers Weigh In on How to Manage the New AI Chatbot (Opinion)

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Sure, the program can lead to cheating, but it can also free up teachers’ time for important instruction.

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Don't Ban ChatGPT. Use It as a Teaching Tool (Opinion)

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Don't Ban ChatGPT. Use It as a Teaching Tool (Opinion)

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I've been a high school English teacher for the past 25 years and I've been assigning essays to my students for just as long. I'm of an age where, as a student, I used to have to drag an encyclopedia out to dutifully research and write up a report about the life cycle of a butterfly. Today's students are light years away from those old research methods.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the way students write essays, and the recent release of the ChatGPT natural-language processing program brings us closer to that future. With the ability to analyze and understand language, this AI tool can help students generate ideas, organize their thoughts, and even write entire essays.

As an English teacher, I can see the potential for misuse by students. Just this week, New York City schools banned the tool on school devices and internet networks, citing concerns over this misuse. However, shutting ourselves off from this technology is not the answer. Teachers will have to embrace AI technology as another tool students have access to. Just like we once taught students how to do a proper Google search, teachers should design clear lessons around how the ChatGPT bot can assist with essay writing. Acknowledging AI's existence and helping students work with it could revolutionize how we teach.

Rather than be wary of ChatGPT, we should embrace how this program can help struggling students learn how to organize their thoughts on paper. By using natural-language processing techniques, this AI tool can "understand" and analyze written or spoken language to generate responses or suggestions. I have used the program to create outlines, templates, and instructions. My experiments have shown me that ChatGPT has the potential to offer students a skeleton with which to begin any number of writing projects.

Wanting to test the bot's capacity to write creatively, I asked the program to produce a villanelle-a poem with a very specific rhyme structure-about the death of a family pet. Though the AI produced a quaint poem on the subject, it did not invoke any profound insight. The bot dutifully reproduced the poem's complex structure-which can be a daunting task for many high schoolers-but it lacked specifics or personal depth.

The bot provided the structure and form which, in theory, could allow students to spend more time reworking the poem to include more complex thoughts and feelings. I can envision all kinds of activities challenging students to use their own voice by replacing nondescript language, creating masterful imagery, and inserting figurative language.

So many students get caught up in the idea that they have nothing to write about, that they don't even know where to start. If teachers can use ChatGPT to show students how to generate prompts to stimulate their writing, the experience could provide a leg up for students who struggle with idea generation.

AI can also help students with the actual writing process by providing templates or outlines for essays. For example, AI could analyze a topic and provide a structure for an essay, including an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Once students have made use of these prompts or outline to write something themselves, AI algorithms can also analyze a student's writing style and provide feedback on grammar, spelling, and structure. One feature of this program can help students revise their writing using better word choice and advanced vocabulary.

I tested this by asking ChatGPT to rewrite a sample essay in the style of a 7th grader, a 10th grader, and a college student. The degree of syntactical differences between each level of the same essay astounded me.

Teachers can design assessments that use this AI-generated feedback to show students how to improve their writing. After reading the suggested improvements, students might handwrite another essay, with no computer assistance, and implement some of the language and sentence structure learned from the bot. Because the bot writes and rewrites so quickly, students can see a number of different ways their writing can improve. It's up to teachers to take away the computer assistance at the right moment during this process and allow students the time needed to put pen to paper to apply what they've learned.

It's important to note that AI is not a replacement for human creativity and critical thinking. While the implications for cheating and inappropriate uses have already sparked concern in my own department, I hope I won't see English teachers devoting hours of professional-development time addressing how to prevent misuse. We already have tools that can help us check whether writing was generated using AI technology.

Rather than blocking and banning this new technology, teachers should work with its astonishing ability to improve student writing. AI has the potential to greatly assist students in the essay-writing process. It can help generate ideas, provide feedback on writing style, and even provide templates or outlines. However, it is important to remember that while AI can certainly aid in the writing process, it is ultimately up to the student to come up with their own ideas and arguments for critical thinking-and it's up to teachers to teach them how. AI can help with the mechanics of writing, but it cannot replace the unique perspective and insights that a human can bring to their work.

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Don't Ban ChatGPT. Use It as a Teaching Tool (Opinion)

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AI is no replacement for human creativity, but it has enormous potential for writing instruction, writes one English teacher.

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10 of the finest ways educators are exploring pedagogical use cases using ChatGPT

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10 of the finest ways educators are exploring pedagogical use cases using ChatGPT

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AI isn’t going to change education.

It just did.

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve seen many educators exploring thought-provoking pedagogical use cases using ChatGPT.

Here are 10 of the finest:

🧵 THREAD OF THREADS

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AI isn’t going to change education.

It just did.

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve seen many educators exploring thought-provoking pedagogical use cases using ChatGPT.

Here are 10 of the finest:

🧵 THREAD OF THREADS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
AI isn’t going to change education.

It just did.

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve seen many educators exploring thought-provoking pedagogical use cases using ChatGPT.

Here are 10 of the finest:

🧵 THREAD OF THREADS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
AI isn’t going to change education.

It just did.

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve seen many educators exploring thought-provoking pedagogical use cases using ChatGPT.

Here are 10 of the finest:

🧵 THREAD OF THREADS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
AI isn’t going to change education.

It just did.

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve seen many educators exploring thought-provoking pedagogical use cases using ChatGPT.

Here are 10 of the finest:

🧵 THREAD OF THREADS

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He used AI art from Midjourney to win a fine-arts prize. Did he cheat? - The Washington Post

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He used AI art from Midjourney to win a fine-arts prize. Did he cheat? - The Washington Post

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When Jason Allen submitted his "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" into the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition last week, the sumptuous print was an immediate hit, beating 20 other artists in the "digitally manipulated photography" category to win the first-place blue ribbon and a $300 prize.

What Allen had only hinted at, however, was that the artwork had been created in large part by an artificial-intelligence tool, Midjourney, that can generate realistic images at a user's command. The portrait of three figures, dressed in flowing robes, staring out to a bright beyond, was so finely detailed the judges couldn't tell.

Allen's piece offers a clear example of how rapidly AI-generated art has advanced. Trained on billions of internet images, the systems have decisively pushed the boundaries of what computers can create.

But it has also sparked a massive debate over the meaning of art, with Allen facing accusations that he had been deceptive in beating out other human artists with something he asked a machine to create.

Text-to-image tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney have quickly increased in sophistication and become one of the hottest topics in AI. They can generate not just fake people, objects and locations but mimic entire visual styles. Users can demand the art piece look like a cartoon storybook or a historical diagram or an Associated Press photograph, and the system will do its best to oblige.

But AI-generated art has been criticized as automated plagiarism, because it relies on millions of ingested art pieces that are then parroted en masse. It has also fueled deeper fears: of decimating people's creative work, blurring the boundaries of reality or smothering human art.

Allen said his art piece shows people need to "get past their denial and fear" of a technology that could empower new inventions and reshape our world. The AI, he said, "is a tool, just like the paintbrush is a tool. Without the person, there is no creative force."

But he also struck a note of defiance at the critics he believed did not appreciate the profound message in his AI-generated art.

"You said AI would never be as good as you, that AI would never do the work you do, and I said, 'Oh really? How about this? I won,'" he said. "It's here now. Recognize it. Stop denying the reality. AI isn't going away."
***
Allen, 39, lives south of his hometown of Colorado Springs and runs a company, Incarnate Games, that makes tabletop fantasy games. He went into the Air Force after high school and got a computer science degree at a Colorado technical school. He does not consider himself an artist and had never entered an arts competition before.

Earlier this year, he said, he started noticing people posting more AI art on social media, but he had been initially skeptical to try it himself due to "spiritual reasons." Elon Musk, he remembered, had compared AI to "summoning the demon," and the practice felt like it could be "a gateway into communicating with the unknown."

"That's what it feels like. This isn't being created by a human," Allen said Thursday while watching a jiujitsu tournament in Las Vegas. "There's a lot to be said about the spiritual meddling of our reality. They would use anything they could to influence humanity."

But the art was just so intricate, he said, that he couldn't stop thinking about it. He started playing with AI-powered art tools: WOMBO Dream, NightCafe, starryai. Then, someone invited him to Midjourney, and he became obsessed.

The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life

Midjourney has become one of the most popular AI art generators largely because it allows anyone to freely create new images on command. Using the prompt "/imagine," a user can type in whatever they want to see and the AI will return four newly created images in 60 seconds. The user can also ask the AI to improve, or "upscale," the visual quality with new variations on the same idea.

The start-up, which calls itself "an independent research lab ... expanding the imaginative powers of the human species," operates largely out of a 1-million-follower network on the chat service Discord, with rooms devoted to character creation, environments and "show and tell."

After paying for a corporate account, Allen started generating thousands of images, changing the text prompts with every creation. He experimented with new settings, scenarios and effects. He asked for images in the styles of Leonardo da Vinci and the American psychedelic artist Alex Grey.

The pieces that really caught his attention, though, were what he now calls his "space opera theater" series. He started with a simple mental image - "a woman in a Victorian frilly dress, wearing a space helmet" - and kept fine-tuning the prompts, "using tests to really make an epic scene, like out of a dream." He said he spent 80 hours making more than 900 iterations of the art, adding words like "opulent" and "lavish" to fine tune its tone and feel. He declined to share the full series of words he used to create his art, saying it is his artistic product, and that he intends to publish it later. "If there's one thing you can take ownership of, it's your prompt," he said.

"I was like: Dude," he said. "This is so sick! I want to see more of it! I'm addicted! I'm obsessed!"

When he found images he really liked, he pulled them into Adobe Photoshop to remove visual artifacts. In one image, the central figure was missing a head, so he also painted in a crop of dark, wavy hair. He used another machine-learning tool, Gigapixel AI, to increase the photos' quality and sharpness, then printed the three pieces on canvas - all variations on the French phrase for "space opera theater," which he thought sounded cool - and drove to submit them to the state fair.

When he looked at the pieces, he said, he saw "a supernatural reality ... something we haven't even been able to experience yet, past the great beyond." But the pace of AI art is moving perhaps even faster than the internet. "You're looking at art from a month ago," he added. "In technology terms, that's decades. This piece is antiquated compared to what Midjourney is doing now."

***

The state fair in Pueblo, Colo., was an unlikely place for the writing of a new chapter in art history. The 150-year-old festival, known for its horse and livestock competitions, runs a series of more traditional art competitions, including for homemade dolls, quilts, porcelain art and needlework, as well as for the best canned carrots, medicinal remedies and holiday breads.

Of the 596 entries in the "fine arts" competition, 21 amateur "emerging artists" submitted pieces of "digitally manipulated photography," one of the fair's newest categories. Asked what art materials he had used, Allen told state fair officials only that he used Midjourney - though he did not exactly go into detail, and no one seems to have asked.

One of the judges, Dagny McKinley, an author and art historian who runs a playwright festival in nearby Steamboat Springs, remembers walking past Allen's canvas and being immediately drawn to a piece that felt reminiscent of Renaissance art.

"It had an immediate story: People looking out into another world, everyone with their backs to you, no one facing or engaging with the viewers," she said. "You get interested: What are they seeing?"

McKinley said she did not realize the art was AI-generated but said it wouldn't have changed her judgment anyway; Allen, she said, "had a concept and a vision he brought to reality, and it's really a beautiful piece."

Sebastian Smee, The Washington Post's art critic, said the piece's textures and lighting are reminiscent of Gustave Moreau, a late 19th-century artist, associated with the Decadents, who influenced Edgar Degas and Henri Matisse. (He also recalled a quote from the artist Sol LeWitt, who said, "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.")

When Allen announced his victory himself on Midjourney's Discord channel, saying he had spent "many weeks of fine tuning and curating," the responses spiraled between muted excitement to outright dread. In a chat board devoted to philosophical debates, one user compared the win to "entering a marathon and driving a Lamborghini to the finish line." Another user wrote that the "stunt" threatened to "get this tool banned and hated even more."

Ready or not, mass video deepfakes are coming

The win also triggered a flood of rage online. A tweet expressing profane dismay at Allen's win has been liked more than 85,000 times. Another person tweeted, "We're watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes." Allen said he has also gotten "a lot of very nasty hate" in his online inboxes; on his game company's Instagram profile, one user said he should return his award and "post a public apology before some MAJOR backlash comes your way."

Some of the frustration has come from how the tools were built: a similar tool, Stable Diffusion, was "trained" on 2 billion images taken from the internet, including from personal blogs and amateur-art sites like Flickr and DeviantArt.

Allen, however, dismisses the point as shallow: "Where did you learn how to do your art? You looked at art. Whose art was it? You learned their techniques, you studied their art, you added it to your repertoire," he said.

Allen listed the pieces for $750 each, he said, and two were sold at the fair to unknown buyers, though he now frets that he should have charged far more, given that it could be "essentially a piece of art history." On Discord, some users asked whether he should have been more explicit, to which Allen replied: "Did I have to?"

Despite the online furor, Allen's neighbors seemed more sanguine about adapting to AI. As far as anyone at the Colorado Department of Agriculture can tell, Allen did not break any rules. Pieces for the category are only required to involve "technology as part of the creative or presentation process." Digital filters, color-manipulation tools and the "recombination of images" are all expressly allowed.

No one has filed an official grievance over the result, either, department spokeswoman Olga Robak said, though there has been an unrelated dispute in the fair's goat-shearing contest.

Robak, who studied art history, finds the controversy fascinating. "People put bananas on the wall and called it art," she said. "Even photography was not considered an art form for a long time; people said it was just pushing a button, and now we realize it's about composition, color, light. Who are we to say that AI is not the same way?"

Don't ask if the duct-tape banana is art. Ask if it's any good.

***

Jessica Hair, a 25-year-old receptionist at a doctor's office who won third place in the competition, said she did not feel Allen had acted unfairly and had no hard feelings about his win.

Hair said her "Judge, Jury, Executioner," which depicts a tuxedoed skeleton on a golden throne surrounded by skulls, took 15 hours to create with a stylus on an iPad Pro. But Allen's piece took time, effort and subjective judgment, too, and "how do we qualify what is and isn't art?" she said.

She did wonder, though, if it might have broken the fair's rules requiring all art to have been made by Colorado residents. Would the AI, wherever it exists, qualify?

McKinley, the contest judge, said she understands the frustrations from some artists feeling spurned in their craft, and she believes the festival should consider a category purely devoted to AI art. But she sees such technology as opening up a new world of possibilities for artists - and as something it'd be better to embrace, since it isn't going away.

"It's not going to take away from a beautiful painting or a sculpture you can touch," she said. "It's just one more tool we have to advance what we can create."

Gregory Block, an oil painter in Denver who was not a part of the competition, said he finds it hard to imagine an AI generator supplanting the hundreds of hours - and all the "heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears" - he's invested into his art. But he also thinks back to the artists that first inspired him, who used rudimentary devices like the camera lucida, in the 1800s, to aid their own designs.

"That was thought of as cheating, too," he said. "Yet they used it to make these incredible paintings: anatomically correct figures, beautiful soft lighting. ... Those steps in technology are elemental to our art. Otherwise, we'd still be doing cave paintings with just our hands and blood."

The AI, he said, can imbue the art with a mysterious beauty, made all the more special because it is so hard to understand. But "the soul any of us can find in a piece of artwork, the emotion, the human struggle we identify with in art is always our own."

"It doesn't have to necessarily be created out of a human soul, the artwork itself. It is for us to see and react to," Block said. "We the viewers are, in the end, the ultimate artists. We're the ones creating the world that is coming in through our eyeballs. That world is in our mind."
Nitasha Tiku contributed to this report.

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He used AI to win a fine-arts competition. Was it cheating?

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When Jason Allen submitted his "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" into the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition last week, the sumptuous print was an immediate hit. It also marked a new milestone in the growth of artificial intelligence.

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ISTE offers free resources and guides for educators who are interested in learning about how artificial intelligence can empower learners at every level.

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Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic

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Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic

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Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

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So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

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So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

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Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

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HAI faculty share their predictions for the coming year.

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Engaging with AI writers in HE| THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect

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Engaging with AI writers in HE| THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect

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Writing already involves AI, in the form of predictive text for example. We are familiar with this on our phones and in our emails. Humans have been collaborating with technology for writing since sticks were used for drawing in sand or on cave walls.

Ingenuity and creativity mean that this technology is constantly changing. Most recently, the advent of AI writers (software that uses artificial intelligence to generate text) has created a lot of excitement and concern.

How do AI writers work? You simply enter what you'd like to write about in an onscreen box and an AI writer will produce almost human-quality text in moments, related to your topic. AI writers can also take an existing piece of text and "spin" it, to produce multiple different versions.

In higher education, worries about academic integrity have clouded exploration of the potentials of AI writing. Yet for people in many careers already, working effectively with AI writers is an essential part of their everyday responsibilities.

Students today need to be prepared for a future in which writing with AI is already becoming essential. Just as word processor functions such as spelling and grammar checks have become accepted and integrated into writing practices, so too will text generators.

Journalists, administrators, content creators, academics, poets and many others are using AI writing in many creative and efficient ways. The problems start when AI writers are not attributed for their input. When students submit AI-authored work as their own, this is a breach of academic integrity.

Yet the lines between human and machine have become blurry. We readily use strings of predictive text in texts and emails, without citing the program or algorithm that produced the words.

So how can students use AI writers in higher education? The following suggestions allow for academic integrity and for the development of higher-level thinking skills.

1. Use AI writers as researchers. They can research a topic exhaustively in seconds and compile text for review, along with references for students to follow up. This material can then inform original and carefully referenced student writing.

2. Use AI writers to produce text on a given topic for critique. Design assessment tasks that involve this efficient use of AI writers, then critical annotation of the text that is produced.
3. Use different AI writers to produce different versions of text on the same topic, to compare and evaluate.
4. Use and attribute AI writers for routine text, for example blog content. Use discrimination to work out where and why AI text, human text or hybrid text are appropriate, and give accounts of this thinking.

5. Use and attribute AI writers for creative text, for example poetry. Google's Verse by Verse requires the user to input a first line, then writes the rest of the poem or provides suggestions based on the work of famous poet muses. This is just one of countless ways that AI can make interventions in creative processes. Students can research the multiple programs and algorithms on offer.
6. Explore and evaluate the different kinds of AI-based content creators that are appropriate for your discipline.
7. Research and establish the specific affordances of AI-based content generators for your discipline. For example, how might it be useful to be able to produce text in multiple languages, in seconds? Or create text optimised for search engines?

8. Explore different ways AI writers and their input can be acknowledged and attributed ethically and appropriately in your discipline. Model effective note-making and record-keeping. Use formative assessment that explicitly involves discussion of the role of AI in given tasks. Discuss how AI could lead to various forms of plagiarism, and how to avoid this.

All the above require specific skills in search optimisation, evaluation and editing. Then there's speculative work: students can create design documentation for AI text and content generators of the future for their own disciplines. What kind of innovative AI could support a landscape gardener? A user experience designer? An accountant? A doctor?

All the suggestions above demand the development of a critical awareness of the normative and excluding potentials of algorithmic content generation. This is a part of the reason why these tools must be acknowledged and, indeed, embraced in higher education. Pretending that they do not exist or banning them outright will not prevent or enhance their use. Some of the key critical questions to ask about any AI text generators are:

What was the body of material on which this AI was trained? In other words, what has this AI read and absorbed, to make its "assumptions" of what strings of words make "sense"?

Who, and what, has been excluded from this body of material, and therefore, potentially, the text generated?

What assumptions, biases and injustices are embedded in this material, and therefore, potentially, in the text generated?

Socially responsible engagement with AI text generators needs to be both creative and critical. The opportunity to experiment with AI - while always being aware that users are themselves training AI in the process - is a vital component of contemporary higher education.
Lucinda McKnight is a senior lecturer in pedagogy and curriculum at Deakin University and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the THE Campus newsletter.

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Eight ways to engage with AI writers in higher education

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Just as spelling checks and predictive text have become accepted, so too will AI writers, so educators should help students responsibly engage with and understand the potential and limitations of these text generators, writes Lucinda McKnight

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ChatGPT and AI text generators: how should higher education respond| THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect

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ChatGPT and AI text generators: how should higher education respond| THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect

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ChatGPT and the rise of AI writers: how should higher education respond?

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The proliferation of AI text generators such as ChatGPT has major implications for higher education. Nancy Gleason explores how educators should respond to these tools which can write essays in seconds

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Human Skills in a World of Artificial Intelligence - John Spencer

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Human Skills in a World of Artificial Intelligence - John Spencer

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Three years ago, I stood in a high-tech lab at a technical university and stared at the giant flat screen monitor. The professor asked me, "Can you tell me which of these samples was generated via Artificial Intelligence?"

At the top, a student had asked a complex question related an application of calculus for calculating fluid flow and heat transfer. Below, a graduate student and an AI chat bot had both answered the question.

I studied both answers over and over again. I looked for clues in the syntax. I tried to find the humanity within the the answers. Finally, I shook my head. I couldn't tell the difference. Both options were clear and concise with just a touch of colloquial friendliness while still remaining slightly cold and objective.

"Are they both the AI?" I asked.

"It's easy to think that. The grad student is an engineer and we tend to be a little robotic," he answered.

The correct answer was B. I stood there in the lab baffled by the progression of machine learning. This wasn't merely "close enough." This was it. Artificial Intelligence had arrived and I felt unnerved.

He then continued, "The students can't tell the difference either. To them, it's just a chat with an expert." My head swirled with questions of the Turing Test, to deep fakes, and to the future of humanity. I'm pretty sure an image from Blade Runner popped in there as well. But more than anything else, I had nagging question, "Will AI replace me?" After all, assessment tends to be a significant aspect of what I do as an educator. But this bot could provide feedback in seconds. And it was good. Really good.

Later, after completing a workshop on student voice and choice, I started wondering if AI would replace assessment or merely amplify it and transform it. Maybe I could spend less time writing out feedback and more time doing one-on-one conferences with that human, dynamic element. Or maybe my role as a professor would change entirely. Perhaps I would vet the AI feedback to make sure it's on-target. Or maybe I would shift toward being more of a course architect and designer. The university would save money provide a cheaper college experience with even less of a human element.

The truth is I can't predict how AI and machine learning will change education. None of us can. Decades ago, Neil Postman reminded us that while it's important to think critically about technology, we can rarely predict its impact on society. Nobody knew the printing press would lead to the rise of the nation-state. Nobody knew the Industrial Revolution would spark climate change. In my own lifetime, I saw bold predictions about "stranger danger" in social media but nobody could have predicted the role of filter bubbles, echo chambers, and the effect these would have on democracy around the world.

We often overreact about certain elements of a new technology and fail to understand the larger social implications of other areas. Right now, I've seen bold predictions about the death of journalism, English Language Arts classes, and software engineers. I'm not so sure. None of us are. All of these fields will change but often in ways that surprise us.

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The AI Revolution Is Already Here

Right now, we are having a cultural moment where we are recognizing the power of Artificial Intelligence. It's been a slow build. Auto-correct here. Grammarly suggestion there. An auto-fill option in G-mail and in Google Searches. A small chat at the bottom left-hand corner with AI who will help you get that refund on the flight you purchased from Expedia. But it always felt small and in the margins. But then ChatGPT came along and suddenly we are left asking, "What does this mean for the future of work? What does mean for teaching and learning?"

The revolution is happening fast. In just over a week, Chat GPT has surpassed a million users. To put that in perspective, it took Instagram two years to reach that benchmark. And this is just the beginning.

I played around with it for hours this week. I started with a typical critical thinking writing prompt I used to ask my students to complete in our social studies class. Could the AI actually compare and contrast 19th century imperialism to 21st century globalization? Absolutely. The answer was creative and exhibited strong critical thinking. I added a parameter. "Explain it to someone who is 14." This was the answer:

Imperialism and globalization are similar in that they both involve the expansion of a country's power and influence over other countries. However, there are some key differences between the two.

19th century imperialism was a form of aggressive expansionism in which powerful countries, such as Britain, France, and Germany, used their military and economic might to conquer and control other nations. This often involved the exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of local people.

On the other hand, 21st century globalization is a more complex and interconnected process in which countries and businesses around the world are increasingly linked through trade, technology, and other forms of exchange. Globalization has brought many benefits, such as increased economic growth and access to new markets, but it has also sparked debates about inequality and the impact on local cultures.

In summary, imperialism was a one-sided process in which powerful countries imposed their will on others, while globalization is a more complex and interconnected process that involves both cooperation and competition between countries.

Again, I started wondering about what this means for the future. It always felt like creativity - and visual creativity in particular - was a distinctly human endeavor. But I have to admit that the AI did a pretty good job with the portrait.

I've been following AI fairly closely for a few years. I've seen how it's wrecking havoc in math classes where students use Photo Math for homework. I've paid attention to some of the applications in engineering. But this week, I kept thinking, "What does all of this mean for the future of education? And more importantly, how will we respond?"

I'd like to share two different routes that both lead to a dead end.

Dead End #1: The Golden Promise of Futurism

When I was in middle school, one of my teachers called the entire class up to the front of the room. He held up a shiny golden disc in wild excitement.

"This will change education forever," he said, eyes gleaming. "Someday, you'll be able to pick up one of these discs and learn exactly what you need to learn. No more taking notes from a teacher. You won't have to learn from someone like me."

I felt uneasy about learning from a golden disc instead of a human. I liked my teacher. I liked how he would change his explanations on the spot just by reading our body language. I liked the way he made us laugh. I enjoyed the inefficient way he got off-topic and we randomly learned things that weren't in the textbook. Why would I want to replace him with a golden disc?

"This is the future of education, kids," he said with a grin. "This will change things forever."

But it did not change education forever. I haven't seen a laser disc in decades and I feel pretty confident that my own kids' teachers will not be replaced by golden discs. Not now. Not ever.

And yet, this is the same sentiment I have seen in many iterations. I've watched as one-to-one devices, laptops, and adaptive learning programs have all promised to replace teachers. Now, it's the promise of AI. But I don't buy it. Teaching will always be a deeply relational endeavor filled with mistakes and missteps and false starts. That's the beauty of it.

Dead End #2: The Lock It and Block It Approach

"Mr. Spencer, I can't talk to my group members," a student called out.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Look, the chat's gone," Carlos pointed to his computer.

"Gone, gone?"

"Mine, too," another student chimed in.

"Yeah, it's not showing up for me, either." I was met with a chorus of "mine won't work as well."

"No worries, just send an email."

This time, their emails were rejected. Nothing seemed to work.

"I got it to work on my phone," another student said. "I just had to use my personal G-mail."

That afternoon, I met with tech support and learned that they had disabled chat and limited emails back and forth due to bullying that had occurred in another classroom. This is an example of second route of blocking the tech. My students were working on a global collaboration project and suddenly couldn't engage in the project.

I've seen this approach happen in schools where they block sites like YouTube, online gaming, and social media. The process here focuses on surveillance, accountability measures, and a blocking of all new tech. In terms of ChatGPT, I'm already seeing English teachers saying things like, "I'll just make students handwrite all their essays in class." But as Mary Beth Hertz brought up on Twitter, this can be ableist. Some students simply need to type their work.

A Third Way - The Human Approach

The danger of futurism is that it fixates on novelty rather than sustainability. It also ignores the shadow sides of technology and the harmful disruptions that happen in society. The danger of the lock and block approach is that it ignores the external context and can lead to a place of irrelevance and heavy-handed surveillance. So, where does that leave us?

There's a third option.

This last February, I read a book called Human Work in an Age of Smart Machines. In this groundbreaking work, the author argues that we should begin with the question, "What is it that we, as humans, can do that machines can't do?" It might mean developing empathy, thinking divergently, , engaging in finding your own unique lens, or coming up with innovative solutions.

Here's the good news. This is precisely what schools all around the world are doing by developing a Graduate Profiles. These are usually in the form of a document that outlines the knowledge, skills, and competencies that students should possess upon completing their K-12 education. They often serve as a blueprint for curriculum design, assessment, and instruction.

In other words, these graduate profiles are looking at the human skills that students will need in an age of AI and machine learning. But it can't simply remain a document that schools have on a website or a poster on a classroom wall. If we're going to develop these deeply human skills, we will need to rethink the type of learning that students engage in. We'll need to de-emphasize (and perhaps even scrap) standardized testing and heavy-handed accountability measures.

I explored this idea in-depth in my book I started out with the idea that AJ and I had shared in that the ladder is now a maze. For years, we learned the formula that we should work hard in school, graduate from a university, and climb a corporate ladder. This was never the reality for everyone. Some folks found success in trade schools. Others as entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, systemic racism, gender bias, and injustice created barriers for millions of marginalized people. Still, it was the formula we were taught. But with the changes in automation, machine learning, globalization, and AI, the ladder is now a maze.

Pundits have said, "We need to prepare students for the jobs that don't exist yet." But we've already seen how quickly this falls into trap of futurism. A decade ago, it was all about teaching every student how to code. Now ChatGPT can produce seemingly flawless code in seconds.

We can't predict what the maze will look like. So, where do we go if can't predict the future?

The answer can be found in taking a vintage innovation approach. With vintage innovation, we avoid the extremes of a reactionary "just block it all" approach as well as the naivety of futurism. Here, we mash up the old school and the new tech. We overlay best and next practices. We ask, "what do students need in a world of AI? What does it mean to do human work in a tech-centric world?"

Vintage innovation is the process of taking old, established ideas and concepts and updating them in a new and innovative way. This can involve reusing, repurposing, or adapting older technologies or designs in order to create something new and improved. Vintage innovation often draws on the past for inspiration and incorporates elements of nostalgia, while also incorporating modern technology and design principles. An example would be blending together the older craft of origami with digital modeling and emerging research in math.

Note: that last paragraph was written by ChatGPT in answer to the question, "What is vintage innovation?" I promise that if I ever use the app, I'll let you know.

What Does Vintage Innovation Look Like with AI?

What if we use ChatGPT as a tool? I know that sounds strange but all new technology comes across as "cheating" in the beginning. I remember teachers telling me to disable spell check because it was cheating. When I was a kid, I had teachers who said that word processing would make it too easy to modify text. They preferred typewriters instead. I still meet teachers who say that starting with Wikipedia is a bad idea. They view that as cheating.

In truth, I can see how creators might use ChatGPT as a part of the writing process in a way that's not all that different from going to Wikipedia first. They'll take the initial 300 words and rework it, add to it, find their own ideas, and ultimately make it their own. In that sense, writing will be more like collage art - which, in many respects, it already is. Your single, solitary voice is distinctly yours but it's also part of a chorus shaped by what your read and listen to and who you talk to and all sorts of elements of your culture. When you write, you are never writing alone.

Yesterday, I took one of my most popular writing prompts and plugged it into the AI. The answer I got was boring. It was solid but boring.

So, I changed it up and asked for it to be funnier. The result was . . . meh.

But what if I used this as a starting place? I could add my own to make it more creative and perhaps even slightly funnier. My revisions are in bold.

Take over the world. But maybe start out small. Perhaps an exoplanet? Or just take over Fresno. Yeah, start out small with Fresno and then go big.

Steal the moon. I mean, not our moon, of course. I need the moon if I'm going to keep surfing. I'm thinking maybe Titan or Io? Perhaps Callisto? Nobody ever pays attention to Callisto.

Create a shrink ray but one that only makes clothes shrink so that everyone in Fresno thinks they gained ten pounds overnight.

Build a giant robot navy. All the villains do an army. We're going with a solid robot navy.

Train army of moderately sized genetically-engineered hamsters.

Hijack Santa's sleigh and replace all the presents with leftover AOL CDs

Create a secret underground lair with a moat full of that weird Midwestern Jell-O Salad that you're grandma used to make with the coconut and walnuts. While we are at it, let's replace the carpet with hardwood floors. Maybe the Property Brothers have some ideas?

Come up with a ridiculous and over-the-top villainous name like Kyle.

Brainwash all the puppies in the world (they make great henchmen) so that they act like cats and their owners can experience the rejection normally dished out by their feline companions

Build a time machine and go back in time to raise baby Batman to be a healthy, well-adjusted adult without any chip on his shoulder. Then attack Gotham City. They'll be defenseless without the Caped Crusader.

So I look at this new list and it's still heavily shaped by AI. But that actually led to a creative constraint that forced me to think divergently. In other words, I had to think outside the box by thinking inside the box:

While I began with AI, I quickly moved into the human element and focused on the things I can do: adding my own voice, having a touch of my quirky humor, and making a personal reference to where I grew up (Fresno). This is a small example of choosing a vintage innovation approach. But beyond this, I think the bigger shift needs to be toward the learning experiences that help students develop those deeply human skills.

Empowering Students for the Future

We often talk about what it means to move from compliance to engagement. It's the idea of creating an environment where students want to learn rather than have to learn. This is that top level of engagement, where students are highly committed and highly focused. But I wonder how often we stop there, with committed and focused students who aren't getting the chance to own their learning. If we want students to be creative, self-directed learners, we need to go beyond student engagement and into empowerment. They need to own the learning. Students need to shift from merely compliance or engagement and into empowerment.

In other words, the best way to prepare students for the future is by empowering them in the present. When this occurs, students develop those critical human skills that they will need as they navigate an uncertain future.

This is why I love project-based learning. Project-based learning is a teaching method that focuses on active, experiential learning through the completion of real-world projects. Students are given a problem or challenge to solve, and they work collaboratively to design, create, and present their solution. When coupled with design thinking, they develop deeper empathy as well. Check out the video below for more information:

If we want students to be curious, we can engage in inquiry-based learning. It might be something as simple as a Wonder Day or Wonder Week project.

We can ask, "What is it that students can learn that can't be replaced by AI?" And the result might be the deeply human connection of a Socratic Seminar, where they learn how to communicate, listen, and engage in nuanced conversation.

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution is just beginning to happen. We'll need to re-imagine what education looks like in the future. My hope is that educational leaders invite librarians into these discussions. For years, they've been thinking hard about issues like media literacy, information architecture, accessibility, copyright, creativity, surveillance, and what makes us human. Talk to them.

In the upcoming years, we'll need to think about how we can help students develop these critical human skills. It might be inquiry-based learning or project-based learning. But it might also be game-based learning. It might be a lo-fi makerspace. It might be an epic, face-to-face science lab or a sketchnote video, or an interview with community members. Notice that none of these ideas are new. These are the things teachers are already doing when they empower their students with voice and choice. So am I nervous about AI? Absolutely. But am I hopeful? Most definitely. Because I know that teachers will always be at the heart of innovation.

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Human Skills in a World of Artificial Intelligence

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Three years ago, I stood in a high-tech lab at a technical university and stared at the giant flat screen monitor. The professor asked me, "Can you tell me which of these samples was generated

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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

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I'm never sure how much overlap there is for the various audiences that consist of the John Warner Writer Experience Universe, but while to folks here I am, "The Biblioracle," book recommender par excellence, to a whole other group I am the author of Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, and The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, and a blogger about education issues at Inside Higher Ed.

Modesty aside, and somewhat to my surprise, I have become an expert in how we teach writing. That expertise was birthed from the frustration I experienced in trying to teach writing to first-year college students over the years, and finding them increasingly disoriented by what I was asking them to do, as though there was no continuity between what they'd experienced prior to college, and what was expected of them in college.

These were well-above average students at selective schools (University of Illinois, Virginia Tech, Clemson), who did not necessarily lack writing skill, but had very negative attitudes towards writing. To cut to the chase, and to keep from repeating everything I cover in Why They Can't Write, rather than having students wrestle with the demands of trying to express themselves inside a genuine rhetorical situation (message/audience/purpose), they were instead producing writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format), which passed muster on standardized tests, but did not prepare them for the demands of writing in college contexts.

My books are a call to change how we approach teaching writing at both a systemic and pedagogical level. What teachers and schools ask students to do is not great, but that asking is bound up with the systems in which it happens, where teachers have too many students, or where grades or the score on an AP test are more important than actually learning stuff. It's not just that we need to change how and what we teach. We have to fundamentally alter the spaces in which this teaching happens.

It is difficult to overstate how bad things have been for a couple of generations of students. This tweet from the writer Lauren Groff ( lamenting what school had done to her son's attitudes towards writing is a not uncommon testimony I hear from parents and students alike.

Deep down, this is a question about what we value, in what we read, what we write, and unfortunately, we have attached a set of values to student writing that are disconnected from anything we actually value about what we read, and what we write.

Along with many others, I've been shouting about these problems for years, often into what felt like a void, but this past week, once people had a chance to see what the ChatGPT could produce, suddenly attention was being paid.

This snapshot from the ChatGPT homepage is a good overview of what OpenAI says ChatGPT can do.

I first wrote about the underlying algorithm (GPT3) at Inside Higher Ed back in March 2021, when it was put to the task of trying to answer some college-level writing assignments and then compared to the output of human students answering the same questions.

For three of the four subjects - research methods, U.S. history and law - the AI passed with a C or better grade. The top human scored better than the AI in each category, but in two categories (research methods, law), the AI beat one or more of the humans.

The subject it tanked was creative writing.

It would not tank creative writing anymore.

At the top next to the purple icon is my prompt. Below that is ChatGPT's response. It took about 60 seconds for it to process and produce the text.

This is not good, exactly, but it also isn't bad. It's perfectly okay, not unlike the kind of thing that a student would produce in an introductory creative writing course. For a short story, that opening sentence is weird, but a clever student making a quick edit could excise it and improve the outcome immediately. In fact, a good overall editorial strategy would be to cut any line that's explicitly in my prompt, so what remains is learned via inference. The weirdest part is perhaps the choice of song, as the upbeat spirit of the song and lyrics about a woman telling her partner not to be tempted by other girls doesn't quite fit the scenario. It's a good example of how the algorithm has no appreciation of meaning and context.

The passage also lacks a sense of place and atmosphere. The descriptions are sterile. I'm going to fix that with an additional prompt.

That's actually starting to approach not bad. It's not good, exactly, but in an introductory class, you don't necessarily expect good. Still, it's lacking something. It feels rather generic, voiceless. Let's see if I can help it out a bit:

This doesn't actually sound like Molly Ivins writing about politics, but the prompt is enough to inject some spark of life into the prose. You can see a couple of immediate improvements over the previous version.

Compare these two sentences:

Eight grade student, Sarah sat on her bed in her room, staring at the ceiling as she thought about Billy, the cute boy in her class.

And

Eighth-grader Sara was holed up in her room, trying to puzzle out the meaning of life, or at least the meaning of Billy, the cute boy in her math class.

The latter is clearly better, more alive. "Holed up" and "puzzled out" are common phrasings, but clearly better than the generic language of the first example. And that line about puzzling out the "meaning of Billy" is downright good.

You know who agrees with me about which is the better narrative? ChatGPT.

If the AI can produce this, imagine what it can do with a canned prompt that you might commonly find in a literature-based high school English class, such as this one, from a sample AP Literature exam, "In many works of fiction, houses take on symbolic importance. Such houses may be literal houses or unconventional houses (e.g., hotels, hospitals, monasteries, or boats). Choose a work of fiction in which a literal or unconventional house serves as a significant symbol. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how this house contributes to the interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot."

I won't bore you by pasting the answer, because it's not worth your time to read it, but it would easily receive the maximum score a 5, particularly given the fact that the AP graders do not pay any attention to whether or not the content of the answer is accurate or true.

I cannot emphasize this enough: ChatGPT is not generating meaning. It is arranging word patterns. I could tell GPT to add in an anomaly for the 1970s - like the girl looking at Billy's Instagram - and it would introduce it into the text without a comment about being anomalous. It is not entirely unlike the old saw about a million monkeys banging on a typewriter for along enough, that one of them would produce the works of Shakespeare through random chance, except this difference is, ChatGPT has been trained on a data set that eliminates all the gibberish.

I sincerely hope that this is the end of the high school English courses that the lamentations are describing because these courses deserve to die, because we can do better than these courses if the actual objective of the courses is to help students learn to write.

But now that this technology is in the world, and will be widely available, we must think about what high school English should look like going forward. I've been thinking about these things for years, so I have a head start on others, but let me be clear ChatGPT has not created a problem that wasn't already present.

One of the assumptions those who say this is the end of high school English make about students is that if students can find an end around doing the actual work of school, they will definitely take it.

What does it say about what we ask students to do in school that we assume they will do whatever they can to avoid it?

Disturbing.

The last time I did it, six or seven years later, 85% said they'd take that deal.

Disastrous.

The students were not lazy or entitled. They were responding rationally to the incentives of the system. An A without learning anything was far more valuable than learning anything, and risking a grade lower than an A. School had nothing to do with learning, and writing courses especially were unlikely to be interesting or engaging.

Well, I set out to prove students wrong, that there was writing worth doing, and over the years developed the curriculum that is collected in The Writer's Practicein order to try to prove that.

The experiences in the book are designed to be both intrinsically interesting, and to engender learning that is both visible to students and relevant to their lives. In my experience, students actually do want to learn stuff because students are people too. The problem is school has ceased to honor their humanity, instead substituting "student-ness."

First step, et's give students something worth doing.

It is a mistake to think we can out-prompt the AI. There are some things the AI is not good at yet - for example, it is an inferior lyricist to Steve Miller (not exactly known for the quality of his lyrics) when provided all the rhyming words from "The Joker."

But for the typical school assignment, it reliably turns out passable results.

I've tested some of the core prompts that I use in The Writer's Practice. In isolation, some are vulnerable to ChatGPT, while others would be very difficult for it to pull off convincingly at this time, but based on the progress I've seen, I have little confidence that we can stay ahead of its ability to bullshit.

But the reason why I'm confident my pedagogy is not vulnerable to ChatGPT is because I do not only grade the end product, but instead, value the process it takes to get there. I ask students to describe how and why they did certain things. I collect the work product that precedes the final document.

I talk to the students, one-on-one about themselves, about their work.

If we assume students want to learn - and I do - we should show our interest in their learning, rather than their performance.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of my career, I did not have the time or resources necessary to fulfill the highest aims of my own pedagogy. The National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) recommends each instructor teach three sections of a maximum of fifteen students each, for a total of 45 students. I never had fewer than 65 students in a semester, and some semesters had in excess of 150.

High school teachers are working under even greater burdens, and in more challenging circumstances. If the system will not support the teachers who must do the work, we may as well let ourselves be overwhelmed by the algorithm.

But part of the problem is that we - and very much including myself here - have been conditioned to reward surface-level competence (like fluent prose) with a grade slike a C+, B-, or B. We may have to get used to not rewarding pro forma work that goes through the motions with passing grades, or it may mean finding other elements of the experience to focus on in terms of grading.

This process of "ungrading" or alternative grading has been gaining significant momentum in recent years, and I think it is a promising way of figuring out what is meaningful to students and what kinds of approaches help them learn. For those who are curious about this movement, I recommend Susan Blum's edited collection, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What to Do Instead), but then again, I would because I wrote a chapter in it on Wile E. Coyote as the hero of ungraders.

Having played around with this stuff for only a few days, my thoughts are early and provisional, but I could see potential in crafting assignments that encourage and empower students to utilize the AI in their work. At his Substack,

interviewed the author Chandler Klang Smith, about how she uses a similar technology, Sudowrite, to help produce her fiction. The AI could be used as a tool, or a toy in a way that opens up experiences of learning.

I'm certain there's people who are way ahead of me on how to do this well. I'll be seeking them out and listening to what they have to say.

The reason the appearance of this tech is so shocking is because it forces us to confront what we value, rather than letting the status quo churn along unexamined. I couldn't do that while I was teaching because the way students were struggling made me feel like I was doing a terrible job, and I wanted to figure out how to do better.

It's possible that one of the things we (as in society collectively) will decide is that students don't need to learn to write anymore, since we have technology that can do that for us.

I think this would be a shame because one of the things I value about writing, is the act of writing itself. It is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.

For me, writing is simultaneously expression and exploration.

In a piece like this, writing is the expression and exploration of an idea (or collection of ideas). It is only through the writing that I can fully understand what I think.

With fiction, for me, writing is the expression and exploration of for lack of a better word: life. Towards the end of my novel, The Funny Man, my narrator says, "Everyone's got a story, and the best ones are those we tell ourselves." That was a little Easter Egg I put in the text before I had any notion that it would one day be published as a reminder of how interesting it was to solve the puzzle of writing a novel. It is in the mouth of my narrator, but the sentiment is mine.

Writing is rewarding. Writing is empowering. Writing is even fun. As human, we are wired to communicate. We are also wired for "play." Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.

It is not an impossible challenge to make this universe of experience accessible to students. We know much about what has to be done already.

It's really a matter of whether or not we will decide to do it.

If you're curious and want to read more reactions to ChatGPT, I recommend this piece from Ian Bogost on how we should see it a "a toy, not a tool." The New York Times podcast "Hard Fork" asks, "Can ChatGPT make this podcast?"This piece by Stephen Johnson is a good one if you want to know more about how ChatGPT does what it does. Writing at Slate, Alex Kantrowitz says that Google has a chat bot that's even better than ChatGPT, but releasing it disrupts their own search business model.

which I wrote about in an earlier newsletter when I asked "How do you know if a book is true?" Also included is Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by

which I swear every married (or unmarried) person should read as a route to improving their own perspective on matrimony.

Here's a quick, music-themed quiz from the Times. I only got four out of five on this one, breaking my perfect streak on these quizzes.

Donna Barba Higuera, winner of this year's Newberry Medal for children's literature for The Last Cuentista, provides a list of her five favorite children's books of 2022.

CrimeReads has released their list of best crime novels of 2022, while the Times has their take on the b est true crime books of the year.

Brittle Paper introduces us to 100 notable African books from this year.

Affiliate income is at $321.30 for the year. We've already topped last year's total of $308.10, but what the heck, why not get to $400 before the year is out. As a reminder, I'm matching up to $500 of affiliate income.

It's gone really well, as far as I'm concerned, but I was recently provided some data about how much more I would be earning if I put at least some of the content behind a paywall, and well...it is quite a bit more.

At the same time, putting posts behind a paywall would reduce the size of my readership, and my primary motive behind maintaining this space is to be read by a community of people interested in some of the same things I'm interested in, so I'm not going to put up a paywall, at least not for these weekly main posts.

But if you do like this newsletter and you can spare the subscription money to support it, I will be incredibly grateful, and the rest of the community thanks you as well.

Alrighty, time to go have a Sunday. You probably won't be hearing from me next week because I'm traveling home to see family and I want to spend time with them, rather than tap tapping on the computer machine, but I have a new installment of "A Book I Wish More People Knew About" that will be coming your way.

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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

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I'm never sure how much overlap there is for the various audiences that consist of the John Warner Writer Experience Universe, but while to folks here I am, "The Biblioracle," book recommender par excellence, to a whole other group I am the author of Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities , and The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing , and a blogger about education issues at Inside Higher Ed .

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The most recent language model, Chat GPT, is an Open AI (Altman, Musk, and other Silicon Valley investors created an artificial intelligence research non-profit organization in 2015) that was created and trained exclusively for conversational engagements. Sam Altman's OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30; it has since taken the tech industry and the internet by storm.

The latest chatbot from OpenAI, which was launched in 2015 by Elon Musk and Altman, is capable of understanding human speech and producing in-depth writing that is appropriate for typing to a friend. An AI chatbot system called Chat Gpt (generating pre-training) is used online to simulate automated customer service chat. This is a significant setup, though, as there are many possible answers.

The application is beneficial for presenting information and responding to queries in a way similar to what would occur in a normal conversation because it has been educated by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Alex Song, CEO and Founder at Proxima

Here's more on ChatGpt:

1. Communication in conversational format:

GPT-3 was previously issued, which caused a number of issues to arise within the organizations. Some questions could not be answered by AI, and it was unable to make up facts. Therefore, the end user occasionally has to alter the prompt, which is the text provided to the AI, but they are still trying to cue the AI.

But theoretically, it would be better if the AI could cue instead of you. Therefore, AI should just ask you if it is not understanding in a conversational manner rather than rephrasing the query to help it comprehend what you are looking for and respond appropriately.Therefore, the direction is now toward this product with Chat GPT.

2. Respond more dynamically - employs Reinforcement learning method

The conversational approach will let the new GPT option respond to more dynamic interactions and will make it more likely to respond than ask. As opposed to Chat GPT, which has been specifically trained for this purpose, GPT-3 was previously used by the end user to initiate interaction. It employs a method known as reinforcement learning from human learning.

3. Technique used:

In particular games like chess, go, poker, and the Atari games, the results of using these tactics have been particularly amazing. Even if the game has set rules and prizes, a conversation does not, therefore human feedback is crucial in this situation.

This was accomplished by asking a model a question, sampling a number of the answers, and then allowing a human to manually rank the answers. Following that, these ranks served as training data for the reward model. The output of the reward model will then be improved by further training a fine-tuned language model using reinforcement learning to react to queries.

In specialized games like chess, go, poker, and Atari games, the results of using these strategies have been particularly amazing. Although there are predetermined rules and rewards for the game, there are no such regulations in a conversation, therefore human feedback is crucial in this situation. This was accomplished by asking a model a question, selecting a few of its responses from the pool, and then having a human hand rank the results.

These ranks then served as training data for the reward model. In order to maximize the output of the reward model, a refined language model will then be further trained using reinforcement learning to respond to inquiries.

4. Sibling Model to InstructGPT:

As a result of the dialogue style, ChatGPT is able to respond to follow-up inquiries, acknowledge its errors, refute false assumptions, and refuse unsuitable proposals. A sibling model to InstructGPT, ChatGPT is taught to follow instructions in prompts and respond in-depth.

5. Responds to everything:

Chatbot that has been trained to engage in conversation. The dialogue model, according to OpenAI, enables ChatGPT to respond to all types of writing, including theoretical essays, mathematical solutions, and stories. It can also answer follow-up questions and the company says that it can also admit when it makes a mistake.

A quantum physicist, science author, and researcher in computer programming, Michael Aaron Nielsen, tweeted -

" OpenAI's new chatbot is amazing. It hallucinates some very interesting things. For instance, it told me about a (v interesting sounding!) book, which I then asked it about:

Unfortunately, neither Amazon nor G Scholar nor G Books thinks the book is real. Perhaps it should be!"

6. Alter the way how people make use of search engines:

By offering customers with more than simply links to browse through, it could fundamentally alter how people use search engines by delivering answers to complex problems and problems. It is not just a good debugging companion but it can also fix the bug when you are asking a question.

7. Free To use and built on GPT-3.5 language technology:

On November 30, the public was given access to the AI-powered chatbot on OpenAI's website. While it is still in the research review stage, users can sign up and test it out for free.

The GPT-3.5 language technology, created by OpenAI, is used by ChatGPT. This sophisticated artificial intelligence model has been trained using a substantial chunk of text data from various resources.

8. Elon Musk Puts a halt to its practice:

As soon as Elon Musk learned that OpenAI was using Twitter's database to train ChatGPT, he immediately put a halt to that practice because OpenAI is no longer open-sourced and non-profit, and it should eventually pay for this knowledge.

9. Human Replacement:

Most significantly, ChatGPT has demonstrated the ability to build complex Python code and compose college-level essays in response to a prompt, raising concerns that such technology may probably replace human workers like journalists or programmers.

Jason DeBolt, an Amazon employee tweeted " Ok this is scary. @OpenAI 's ChatGPT can generate hundreds of lines of Python code to do multipart uploads of 100 GB files to an AWS S3 bucket from the phrase "Write Python code to upload a file to an AWS S3 bucket".
Marketing Technology News: Using SEO to Build a Marketing Strategy for the Future

Some interesting know to facts on the technology:

Many businesses, including Microsoft, have experimented with chatbots, but they haven't had much luck. In less than 24 hours, Twitter users taught Microsoft's Tay bot misogynistic and racist language, according to The Verge, which ultimately led to its extinction.

Tay was a bot that was launched by Microsoft in 2016. When BlenderBot 3 was released by Meta in August, the company made a small foray into the chatbot arena. According to Mashable, the bot, like Tay, came under fire for disseminating racial, antisemitic, and misleading information, including the assertion that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

In order to prevent these kinds of incidents, OpenAI has implemented Moderation API, an AI-based moderation system that has been taught to help developers determine whether language violates the company's content policy, which prevents harmful or unlawful content from being communicated. OpenAI admits that its moderation still has issues and isn't perfect.
So, what is the future of AI Chatbots? Well, in this regard, Altman tweeted, "Soon, you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions and give advice, in real-time..."

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The most recent language model, Chat GPT, is an Open AI (Altman, Musk, and other Silicon Valley investors created an artificial intelligence research non-profit organization in 2015) that was created and trained exclusively for conversational engagements. Sam Altman's OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30; it has since taken the tech industry and the internet by storm.

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How do DALL-E and other forms of generative AI work? - Big Think

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How do DALL-E and other forms of generative AI work? - Big Think

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DALL-E is spooky good. Not so many years ago, it was easy to conclude that AI technologies would never generate anything of a quality approaching human artistic composition or writing. Now, the generative model programs that power DALL-E 2 and Google's LaMDA chatbot produce images and words eerily like the work of a real person. Dall-E makes artistic or photorealistic images of a variety of objects and scenes.

How do these image-generating models work? Do they function like a person, and should we think of them as intelligent?

How diffusion models work

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is the bleeding edge of AI technology. The proprietary computer code was developed by the misnomered OpenAI, a Bay Area tech operation which began as a non-profit before turning for-profit and licensing GPT-3 to Microsoft. GPT-3 was built to produce words, but OpenAI tweaked a version to produce DALL-E and its sequel, DALL-E 2, using a technique called diffusion modeling.

Diffusion models perform two sequential processes. They ruin images, then they try to rebuild them. Programmers give the model real images with meanings ascribed by humans: dog, oil painting, banana, sky, 1960s sofa, etc. The model diffuses - that is, moves - them through a long chain of sequential steps. In the ruining sequence, each step slightly alters the image handed to it by the previous step, adding random noise in the form of scattershot meaningless pixels, then handing it off to the next step. Repeated, over and over, this causes the original image to gradually fade into static and its meaning to disappear.

We cannot predict how well, or even why, an AI like this works. We can only judge whether its outputs look good.

When this process is finished, the model runs it in reverse. Starting with the nearly meaningless noise, it pushes the image back through the series of sequential steps, this time attempting to reduce noise and bring back meaning. At each step, the model's performance is judged by the probability that the less noisy image created at that step has the same meaning as the original, real image.

While fuzzing up the image is a mechanical process, returning it to clarity is a search for something like meaning. The model is gradually "trained" by adjusting hundreds of billions of parameters - think of little dimmer switch knobs that adjust a light circuit from fully off to fully on - within neural networks in the code to "turn up" steps that improve the probability of meaningfulness of the image, and to "turn down" steps that do not. Performing this process over and over on many images, tweaking the model parameters each time, eventually tunes the model to take a meaningless image and evolve it through a series of steps into an image that looks like the original input image.

To produce images that have associated text meanings, words that describe the training images are taken through the noising and de-noising chains along at the same time. In this way, the model is trained not only to produce an image with a high likelihood of meaning, but with a high likelihood of the same descriptive words being associated with it. The creators of DALL-E trained it on a giant swath of pictures, with associated meanings, culled from all over the web. DALL-E can produce images that correspond to such a weird range of input phrases because that's what was on the internet.

The inner workings of a diffusion model are complex. Despite the organic feel of its creations, the process is entirely mechanical, built upon a foundation of probability calculations. ( This paper works through some of the equations. Warning: The math is hard.)

Essentially, the math is about breaking difficult operations down into separate, smaller, and simpler steps that are nearly as good but much faster for computers to work through. The mechanisms of the code are understandable, but the system of tweaked parameters that its neural networks pick up in the training process is complete gibberish. A set of parameters that produces good images is indistinguishable from a set that creates bad images - or nearly perfect images with some unknown but fatal flaw. Thus, we cannot predict how well, or even why, an AI like this works. We can only judge whether its outputs look good.

Are generative AI models intelligent?

It's very hard to say, then, how much DALL-E is like a person. The best answer is probably not at all. Humans don't learn or create in this way. We don't take in sensory data of the world and then reduce it to random noise; we also don't create new things by starting with total randomness and then de-noising it. Towering linguist Noam Chomsky pointed out that a generative model like GPT-3 does not produce words in a meaningful language any differently from how it would produce words in a meaningless or impossible language. In this sense, it has no concept of the meaning of language, a fundamentally human trait.

Even if they are not like us, are they intelligent in some other way? In the sense that they can do very complex things, sort of. Then again, a computer-automated lathe can create highly complex metal parts. By the definition of the Turing Test (that is, determining if its output is indistinguishable from that of a real person), it certainly might be. Then again, extremely simplistic and hollow chat robot programs have done this for decades. Yet, no one thinks that machine tools or rudimentary chatbots are intelligent.

A better intuitive understanding of current generative model AI programs may be to think of them as extraordinarily capable idiot mimics. They're like a parrot that can listen to human speech and produce not only human words, but groups of words in the right pattens. If a parrot listened to soap operas for a million years, it could probably learn to string together emotionally overwrought, dramatic interpersonal dialog. If you spent those million years giving it crackers for finding better sentences and yelling at it for bad ones, it might get better still.

Or consider another analogy. DALL-E is like a painter who lives his whole life in a gray, windowless room. You show him millions of landscape paintings with the names of the colors and subjects attached. Then you give him paint with color labels and ask him to match the colors and to make patterns statistically mimicking the subject labels. He makes millions of random paintings, comparing each one to a real landscape, and then alters his technique until they start to look realistic. However, he could not tell you one thing about what a real landscape is.

Another way to gain insight into diffusion models is to look at the images produced by a simpler one. DALL-E 2 is the most sophisticated of its kind. Version one of DALL-E often produced images that were nearly correct, but clearly not quite, such as dragon-giraffes whose wings did not properly attach to their bodies. A less powerful open source competitor is known for producing unsettling images that are dream-like and bizarre and not quite realistic. The flaws inherent in a diffusion model's meaningless statistical mashups are not hidden like those in the far more polished DALL-E 2.

The future of generative AI

Whether you find it wondrous or horrifying, it appears that we have just entered an age in which computers can generate convincing fake images and sentences. It's bizarre that a picture with meaning to a person can be generated from mathematical operations on nearly meaningless statistical noise. While the machinations are lifeless, the result looks like something more. We'll see whether DALL-E and other generative models evolve into something with a deeper sort of intelligence, or if they can only be the world's greatest idiot mimics.

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How do DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and other forms of generative AI work?

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DALL-E is spooky good. Not so many years ago, it was easy to conclude that AI technologies would never generate anything of a quality approaching human artistic composition or writing. Now, the generative model programs that power DALL-E 2 and Google's LaMDA chatbot produce images and words eerily like the work of a real person.

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ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue

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ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue

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Contributors: John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Christina Kim, Jacob Hilton, Jacob Menick, Jiayi Weng, Juan Felipe Ceron Uribe, Liam Fedus, Luke Metz, Michael Pokorny, Rapha Gontijo Lopes, Shengjia Zhao, Arun Vijayvergiya, Eric Sigler, Adam Perelman, Chelsea Voss, Mike Heaton, Joel Parish, Dave Cummings, Rajeev Nayak, Valerie Balcom, David Schnurr, Tomer Kaftan, Chris Hallacy, Nicholas Turley, Noah Deutsch, Vik Goel, Jonathan Ward, Aris Konstantinidis, Wojciech Zaremba, Long Ouyang, Leonard Bogdonoff, Joshua Gross, David Medina, Sarah Yoo, Teddy Lee, Ryan Lowe, Dan Mossing, Joost Huizinga, Roger Jiang, Carroll Wainwright, Diogo Almeida, Steph Lin, Marvin Zhang, Kai Xiao, Katarina Slama, Steven Bills, Alex Gray, Jan Leike, Jakub Pachocki, Phil Tillet, Shantanu Jain, Greg Brockman, Nick Ryder, Alex Paino, Qiming Yuan, Clemens Winter, Ben Wang, Mo Bavarian, Igor Babuschkin, Szymon Sidor, Ingmar Kanitscheider, Mikhail Pavlov, Matthias Plappert, Nik Tezak, Heewoo Jun, William Zhuk, Vitchyr Pong, Lukasz Kaiser, Jerry Tworek, Andrew Carr, Lilian Weng, Sandhini Agarwal, Karl Cobbe, Vineet Kosaraju, Alethea Power, Stanislas Polu, Jesse Han, Raul Puri, Shawn Jain, Benjamin Chess, Christian Gibson, Oleg Boiko, Emy Parparita, Amin Tootoonchian, Kyle Kosic, Christopher Hesse

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We've trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

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Teachers you can write a student report in seconds if you…

1. Have grades ready

2. Write a few insightful bullet points about the student

3. Use OpenAI ChatGPT account

Congrats.

You wrote a professional report in seconds.

Here's how I did it 👇

#education #edutwitter #AI

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Teachers you can write a student report in seconds if you…

1. Have grades ready

2. Write a few insightful bullet points about the student

3. Use OpenAI ChatGPT account

Congrats.

You wrote a professional report in seconds.

Here's how I did it 👇

#education #edutwitter #AI https://t.co/sBXsHHiUBG

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Teachers you can write a student report in seconds if you…

1. Have grades ready

2. Write a few insightful bullet points about the student

3. Use OpenAI ChatGPT account

Congrats.

You wrote a professional report in seconds.

Here's how I did it 👇

#education #edutwitter #AI https://t.co/sBXsHHiUBG

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Teachers you can write a student report in seconds if you…

1. Have grades ready

2. Write a few insightful bullet points about the student

3. Use OpenAI ChatGPT account

Congrats.

You wrote a professional report in seconds.

Here's how I did it 👇

#education #edutwitter #AI https://t.co/sBXsHHiUBG

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Teachers you can write a student report in seconds if you…

1. Have grades ready

2. Write a few insightful bullet points about the student

3. Use OpenAI ChatGPT account

Congrats.

You wrote a professional report in seconds.

Here's how I did it 👇

#education #edutwitter #AI

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Still think ChatGPT is bad for education? 

I just gave it a mark scheme and a sample student answer from an AQA GCSE English Language paper.

Look what happened 👇

*Spoiler: It marked it accurately in seconds*

#education #edutwitter #edtech #AI

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Still think ChatGPT is bad for education? 

I just gave it a mark scheme and a sample student answer from an AQA GCSE English Language paper.

Look what happened 👇

*Spoiler: It marked it accurately in seconds*

#education #edutwitter #edtech #AI https://t.co/bj49QPhWeV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Still think ChatGPT is bad for education? 

I just gave it a mark scheme and a sample student answer from an AQA GCSE English Language paper.

Look what happened 👇

*Spoiler: It marked it accurately in seconds*

#education #edutwitter #edtech #AI https://t.co/bj49QPhWeV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Still think ChatGPT is bad for education? 

I just gave it a mark scheme and a sample student answer from an AQA GCSE English Language paper.

Look what happened 👇

*Spoiler: It marked it accurately in seconds*

#education #edutwitter #edtech #AI https://t.co/bj49QPhWeV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Still think ChatGPT is bad for education? 

I just gave it a mark scheme and a sample student answer from an AQA GCSE English Language paper.

Look what happened 👇

*Spoiler: It marked it accurately in seconds*

#education #edutwitter #edtech #AI

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10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI 

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10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI 

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Everyone’s using ChatGPT. 

But almost everyone's STUCK in beginner mode.

10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI:

(cut-and-paste these prompts👇)

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Everyone’s using ChatGPT. 

But almost everyone's STUCK in beginner mode.

10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI:

(cut-and-paste these prompts👇)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Everyone’s using ChatGPT. 

But almost everyone's STUCK in beginner mode.

10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI:

(cut-and-paste these prompts👇)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Everyone’s using ChatGPT. 

But almost everyone's STUCK in beginner mode.

10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI:

(cut-and-paste these prompts👇)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Everyone’s using ChatGPT. 

But almost everyone's STUCK in beginner mode.

10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI:

(cut-and-paste these prompts👇)

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Addy AI - Stealth Startup in San Francisco

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At the intersection of AI and Cloud computing. We are a stealth startup based in San Francisco.

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Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot? NY Times

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Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot? NY Times

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Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot? - The New York Times

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Claire Cain Miller, Adam Playford, Larry Buchanan and Aaron KrolikDec. 26, 2022

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Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot?

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Don’t be surprised if you can’t always tell. Neither could two teachers, a professor, nor even the renowned children’s author Judy Blume.

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Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States require a professional license exam, commonly referred to as "the Bar Exam," as a precondition for law practice. To even sit for the exam, most jurisdictions require that an applicant completes at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school.

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Are you smarter than AI? Computer language model the clear winner over people in IQ tests

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Are you smarter than AI? Computer language model the clear winner over people in IQ tests

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Are you smarter than AI? Computer language model the clear winner over people in IQ tests - Study Finds

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LOS ANGELES - Are you smarter than artificial intelligence? A new study finds one revolutionary program is putting human intellect to shame.

Researchers from UCLA have found that the autoregressive language model Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) clearly outperforms the average college student in a series of reasoning tests that measure intelligence. The program uses deep learning to produce human-like text. GPT-3, a technology created by OpenAI, has a host of applications, including language translation and generating text for applications such as chatbots.

It's currently one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models, with 175 billion parameters.

Is GPT-3 a mechanical 'genius'?

The new study looked at the program's ability to match humans in three key factors: general knowledge, SAT exam scores, and IQ. Results, published on the pre-print server , show that the AI language model finished in a higher percentile than humans across all three categories.

How does GPT-3 perform on an actual IQ test?

UCLA published findings on how various Language Models performed on analytical reasoning questions against an average college applicant.

The AI was the clear winner. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/pVM1hLde7H

- AI Breakfast (@AiBreakfast) December 27, 2022

"We found that GPT-3 displayed a surprisingly strong capacity for abstract pattern induction, matching or even surpassing human capabilities in most settings. Our results indicate that large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems," researchers Taylor Webb, Keith Holyoak, and Hongjing Lu write in their report, which is still awaiting peer-review.

The team adds that GPT-3, "has been forced to develop mechanisms similar to those thought to underlie human analogical reasoning - despite not being explicitly trained to do so... through a radically different route than that taken by biological intelligence."

GPT-3 outperformed human participants on all problem types, both in terms of generative accuracy... and multiple-choice accuracy pic.twitter.com/KQge8cDQzh

- AI Breakfast (@AiBreakfast) December 27, 2022

The study found that the AI program, which can answer most questions and even draft papers for people, outperformed humans when having to answer questions from scratch and when selecting from a multiple-choice test. On logic problems alone, humans finished in the 38th percentile. Meanwhile, the AI system scored in the 80th percentile.

AI expert and author Dr. Alan D. Thompson suggests that GPT-3 displays an IQ above 120. No surprise, this falls into the category of "gifted."

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Are you smarter than AI? Computer language model the clear winner over people in IQ tests

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LOS ANGELES - Are you smarter than artificial intelligence? A new study finds one revolutionary program is putting human intellect to shame. Researchers from UCLA have found that the autoregressive language model Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) clearly outperforms the average college student in a series of reasoning tests that measure intelligence.

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The world's changing too quickly to rely on clunky, outdated design software. Whether you're training teams, teaching classes, or just need a clear way to share your knowledge, use a suite of AI-assisted, intuitive design tools to make your learners successful in industries and disciplines that never stand still.

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The world's changing too quickly to rely on clunky, outdated design software. Whether you're training teams, teaching classes, or just need a clear way to share your knowledge, use a suite of AI-assisted, intuitive design tools to make your learners successful in industries and disciplines that never stand still.

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Stable Diffusion Prompt Book - OpenArt | OpenArt

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Search 10M+ of AI art and prompts generated by DALL·E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion

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Prompt crafting is one of the most important ways to improve the quali... | TikTok

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Prompt crafting is one of the most important ways to improve the quality of results. You get with generative AI. Here’s an incredible resource to get you started. Not only does this resource teach you how to craft prompts it also shows you how fast the understanding of these systems are. #PromptCrafting #PromptEngineering #StableDiffusion #MidJourney #Dalle #AIArtist #Trending #greenscreen 

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NYC bans access to ChatGPT on school computers, networks - Chalkbeat New York

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New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT - the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing - on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.

The education department blocked access to the program, citing "negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content," a spokesperson said. The move from the nation's largest school system could have ripple effects as districts and schools across the country grapple with how to respond to the arrival of the dynamic new technology.

The chatbot's ability to churn out pitch perfect essay responses to prompts spanning a wide range of subjects has sparked fears among some schools and educators that their writing assignments could soon become obsolete - and that the program could encourage cheating and plagiarism.

"Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools' networks and devices," said education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle. "While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success."

Individual schools can still request access to the site if they're planning to study the technology behind the chatbot, a department spokesperson said.
Related: New York City schools blocked ChatGPT. Here's what other large districts are doing
The program, created by the organization OpenAI, uses machine learning to come up with its own custom-made responses to specific prompts. It can pull and compile historical facts, write in specific styles, and make convincing logical arguments - all with nearly perfect grammar (unless a user gives a prompt to add grammatical errors).

That's posing some thorny questions for educators who rely on independent writing assignments to build and assess students' understanding and critical thinking skills.

One high school English teacher argued in The Atlantic that the chatbot spells the "end of high school English."

The program still has limitations, sometimes coming up with inaccurate conclusions or even including offensive language.

It's unclear if or how many other districts are banning the program. Several other large school districts did not immediately respond to Chalkbeat's inquiries about how they're handling ChatGPT. But the decision from the nation's largest school system could well influence how other districts act.

The education department's ban will only cut off access to the chatbot in some settings. Students can still get on the site on non-education department devices or internet networks.

Adam Stevens, a longtime New York City history teacher who started his career at Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn and now teaches at Brooklyn Tech, believes that blocking the program is counterproductive. He compared the fears now swirling around ChatGPT to those that emerged around Google.

"People said the same thing about Google 15 or 20 years ago when students could 'find answers online,'" he said.

The program could even prove useful in some cases, Stevens added, generating a "baseline" response to an essay prompt that the class could analyze together and figure out how to improve upon.

Stevens argued that the best way to discourage students from using ChatGPT and building up their critical writing skills is by "assigning them work that is inviting them to explore things worth knowing," and moving away from teaching formulaic writing based on strict rubrics.

"We've trained a whole generation of kids to pursue rubric points and not knowledge," he added, "and of course, if what matters is the point at the end of the semester, then ChatGPT is a threat."

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

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NYC blocks access to ChatGPT on school networks as cheating fears swirl

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The chatbot's ability to churn out pitch perfect essay responses to prompts spanning a wide range of subjects has sparked fears among some educators that their writing assignments could soon become obsolete - and that the program could encourage cheating and plagiarism.

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How Disruptive Will ChatGPT Be? – Dr. Catlin Tucker

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How Disruptive Will ChatGPT Be? – Dr. Catlin Tucker

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How Disruptive Will ChatGPT Be? - Dr. Catlin Tucker

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Education circles are buzzing with the implications of ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI This AI technology specializes in dialogue and generates original responses to questions in moments. The answers are sophisticated, structured, and in the words of one high school teacher, are "better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher [...]

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Stanford faculty weigh in on ChatGPT's shake-up in education | Stanford Graduate School of Education

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Stanford faculty weigh in on ChatGPT's shake-up in education | Stanford Graduate School of Education

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The recent release of ChatGPT - a new natural language processor that can write essays, spit out a Haiku, and even produce computer code - has prompted more questions about what this means for the future of society than even it can answer, despite efforts to make it try.

Faculty from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning are already thinking about the ways in which ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence will change and contribute to education in particular.

Victor Lee, associate professor of education and the faculty lead for the accelerator initiative on generative AI in education, stresses the importance of educators in harnessing this technology. "If we want generative AI to meaningfully improve education," he says, "there is the obvious step we need to take of listening to the existing expertise in education - from educators, parents, students, and scholars who have spent years studying education - and using what we learn to find the most pertinent and valuable use cases for generative AI in a very complicated educational system."

Over the next several weeks, the Stanford Accelerator for Learning will launch listening sessions and gatherings with educators to strategize a path for generative AI. Says Lee, "We need the use of this technology to be ethical, equitable, and accountable."

Here are some initial thoughts from accelerator faculty on the possibilities and risks of generative AI in education.
What's next for high school essays and writing?
"Teachers are talking about ChatGPT as either a dangerous medicine with amazing side effects or an amazing medicine with dangerous side effects. When it comes to teaching writing, I'm in the latter camp.

"First, ChatGPT may help students use writing as a tool for thinking in ways that students currently do not. Many students are not yet fluent enough writers to use the process of writing as a way to discover and clarify their ideas. ChatGPT may address that problem by allowing students to read, reflect, and revise many times without the anguish or frustration that such processes often invoke.

"Second, teachers can use the tool as a way of generating many examples and nonexamples of a form or genre. Often, teachers have the resources and bandwidth to find or create one or two models of a particular kind of writing - say, a personal narrative about a family relationship. As a result, students may come to believe that there is only one way to write such a narrative. ChatGPT allows teachers to offer students many examples of a narrative about family where the basic content remains the same but style, syntax, or grammar differ. With many examples to compare and analyze, students can begin to see the relationship between form and content. They can develop criteria for what makes a strong piece of writing, or how one verb might affect readers differently than another. For teachers, designing instruction has just become much easier - ChatGPT is essentially a tool for creating contrasting cases, and most teachers will be delighted that ChatGPT is doing a lot of the legwork for them.

"Obviously, teachers are less delighted about the computer doing a lot of legwork for students. And students still need to learn to write. But in what way, and what kinds of writing? A third side effect of this new medicine is that it requires all of us to ask those questions and probably make some substantive changes to the overarching goals and methods of our instruction."

- Sarah Levine, assistant professor of education
What will it mean for college admissions?
"There is some consternation in the admissions space about these technologies, and with obvious good reason. In one recent Twitter thread, someone posted an AI-generated essay and the results of an informal study showing that over half of admissions officers identified it as not being computer-generated. With SAT/ACT test score usage waning in many admissions sectors, the narrative portions of college applications may receive additional emphasis in evaluation of merit and deservingness. This was our worry when we found the content of admission essays to be more strongly correlated with income than are SAT scores.

"AI complicates this space immensely, though in what direction policy-wise, it's hard to say. My best guess is that access to the technology will make its use in admission essays more prevalent among lower-socioeconomic status households. Why? Because wealthier folks, as they've shown in the past, are quite savvy and will know that (1) places like ETS [Educational Testing Service, which develops standardized tests for K-12 and higher education] are already working on algorithms to accurately detect AI-written essays; and (2) anything available to the masses is something to not only avoid but to counter with a more exclusive strategy. That might look like writing non-standard essays - poetry or a mini-screenplay, for example - or something else. The drive for maintaining social distinction and its attendant privilege is quite strong. And there certainly will be a for-profit cottage industry rising up to meet the demand to help richer families in their quest. Things are moving fast, though, and perhaps at such a speed that technology's potential democratic effects do surface in this space."

- Anthony Lising Antonio, associate professor of education
We need to remember that language, even from ChatGPT, is deeply linked to culture and cognition
"The innovation centers the capacity to replicate and, in some cases, enhance how human intelligence emerges in dialogue. On its merit, this advancement has the potential to improve how software supports students' learning through rich, computer-generated dialogue. This is an incredibly important technological advancement that must understand the cognitive and cultural benefits of dialogue as an educational tool. To replicate dialogue without an understanding of the cultural and cognitive benefits of dialogue runs the risk of centering a singular cultural lens: that of the designer.

"Dialogue serves many purposes. Social science research indicates that dialogue represents cultural membership, gender identification, and group membership broadly. Said differently, how something is said sends multiple messages. On one level all dialogic communications send a message of content. The message shares an idea. On another level a message sends a message of belonging and identity. How the message is communicated sends a cue of who the message is for and who the speaker is. This subtle intersection of language cues and language identities embeds a message in every dialogical exchange. So, artificial intelligence must embed the power of cultural cues in its communicative pathways. They are already there. How something is said sends a message of who the speaker expects to be.

"From my cognitive perspective, dialogue serves as both an assessment tool and a tool for developing mastery. It is vital that the AI developers create opportunities for students to explain their way toward expertise, to use artificial intelligence for feedback and corrective support, while explicitly ensuring all students are able to receive cues of cultural belonging. In thinking this way, all kids may benefit from AI technologies if developers do the important work of centering the intersection of language, culture, and cognition."

- Bryan A. Brown, professor of education
What about opportunities for kids with disabilities?
"In the disability space, I've been having conversations about (a) how we could use AI to code videos of teachers and other instructors to coach on instructional practices that have been demonstrated to be useful for kids (i.e., providing opportunities to respond; corrective feedback); and (b) ways AI could possibly help us develop smarter tutoring that is responsive to students' needs. There seem to be a lot of opportunities."

- Chris Lemons, associate professor of education
What will students need to know now?
"We have a glimpse of new things that are going to be built with generative AI. What do we need students to know and understand about how these are built, how they work, and the costs and benefits (financial, ethical, environmental, social) of different technologies for different visions of what education is supposed to do? As a first step, we need to seriously examine how generative AI is changing how different fields and disciplines do their work and what ideas students need to develop to both build and use AI for humans rather than in place of humans."

- Victor Lee

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Stanford faculty weigh in on ChatGPT's shake-up in education

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The recent release of ChatGPT - a new natural language processor that can write essays, spit out a Haiku, and even produce computer code - has prompted more questions about what this means for the future of society than even it can answer, despite efforts to make it try.

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Disruptive Technology: ChatGPT and Education 

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Disruptive Technology: ChatGPT and Education 

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Education circles are buzzing with the implications of ChatGPT, a new AI technology. In this episode, I discuss the implications of this disruptive technology in education and how teachers can approach this work in a rapidly changing world.

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disruptive technology: chatgpt and education

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‎The Balance, by Dr. Catlin Tucker: Disruptive Technology: ChatGPT and Education on Apple Podcasts

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Education circles are buzzing with the implications of ChatGPT, a new AI technology. In this episode, I discuss the implications of this disruptive technology in education and how teachers can approach this work in a rapidly changing world.

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Babbage: The tech behind ChatGPT PODCAST

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Babbage: The tech behind ChatGPT PODCAST

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ChatGPT is just one example of a new type of artificial intelligence, which could become the next major general-purpose technology. This week, we revisit one of our favourite episodes of 2022, which explains why "foundational AI" promises to be so transformative.
The Economist's Ludwig Siegele explains why ChatGPT has been taking the world by storm, and why foundation models, or generative AI, could end up having an economic impact similar to that of electricity. Jack Clark of Anthropic AI tells us about the new AI ecosystem that is emerging. Reeps One, a beatboxer, explains how he uses machine learning to compose music. And Kate Crawford, the author of "Atlas of AI", considers why the technology is proving so controversial. Alok Jha hosts.
Babbage will be published every Wednesday from January 4th 2023.
For full access to The Economist's print, digital and audio editions, subscribe at economist.com/podcastoffer and sign up for our weekly science newsletter at economist.com/simplyscience.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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babbage: the tech behind chatgpt—an episode from our archive

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‎Babbage from The Economist: Babbage: The tech behind ChatGPT-an episode from our archive on Apple Podcasts

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ChatGPT is just one example of a new type of artificial intelligence, which could become the next major general-purpose technology. This week, we revisit one of our favourite episodes of 2022, which explains why "foundational AI" promises to be so transformative. The Economist's Ludwig Siegele expla...

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ChatGPT and Solving Math Problems | Medium

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ChatGPT and Solving Math Problems | Medium

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In December 2022 OpenAI announced the public availability of ChatGPT - a more conversational AI.

I wanted to investigate how well it can now solve common mathematics problems - not basic computational ones that google can solve such as "how many miles is 15 km" but actually show/tell me how to solve a problem.

Pythagorean Theorem

First, I asked it a pretty guided question involving the pythagorean theorem:

"How do I use the pythagorean theorem to solve for the hypotenuse when the other two sides are 9 and 16?"

Then, I removed some scaffolding hints from the previous question:

Pretty impressive - code included.

Next, I wanted to see if it could be used to help people know how to solve broader cases:

"How can I find the missing side of a non-right triangle?" and...

Here I was impressed because ChatGPT not only used the law of cosines but showed an example of it, etc.

Logic Puzzles

Ok, so when it comes to a common mathematical (high school level) problems, it does pretty well! But what about more complex puzzles?

My kids have been into discussing questions from a "historical connections" book published by the AIMS education foundation and so I put one of the puzzles from the book by Benjamin Banneker into Chat.

Suppose a ladder 60 feet long is placed in a Street so as to reach a window on one Side 37 feet high, and without moving it at bottom, will reach another window on the other side of the Street which is 23 feet high, how far across is the street?

The result:

My own scratch work (sorry limited paper and writing utensils as my desk!) shows this is wrong... Chat GPT thought the window heights were to be subtracted instead of computed separately then added. (right?) Still, I was very impressed it was able to conceptualize the 'building' and 'window heights' and convert that to mathematical data. It would be a great " my favorite no " kind of response to get kids to think a lot.

However, I also selected 'thumbs down' on my Chat GPT instance and gave the feedback that the solution didn't take this into account. I'll keep hitting refresh until it gets it right, and thus help train the model better. That's the beauty of AI and machine learning... they don't tire of learning from mistakes!

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I wanted to investigate how well it can now solve common mathematics problems - not basic computational ones that google can solve such as "how many miles is 15 km" but actually show/tell me how to...

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ChatGPT for Educators: An Introduction - YouTube

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ChatGPT for Educators: An Introduction - YouTube

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How to Use ChatGPT and Still Be a Good Person - The New York Times

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How to Use ChatGPT and Still Be a Good Person - The New York Times

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How to Use ChatGPT and Still Be a Good Person

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It’s a turning point for artificial intelligence, and we need to take advantage of these tools without causing harm to ourselves or others.

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Ini adalah ekstensi yang menampilkan respon dari ChatGPT bersamaan dengan Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, dan mesin pencari lainnya.

Anda juga dapat memulai obrolan dengan ChatGPT segera setelah mendapatkan jawaban.

Fitur:
* Mendukung semua mesin pencari populer
* Obrolan dengan ChatGPT tentang pertanyaan dan jawaban.
* Mendukung API OpenAI resmi (Baik GPT-3.5-Turbo dan GPT-3)
* Mendukung ChatGPT Plus dan GPT-4 (GPT-4 memerlukan pengaktifan manual dalam opsi)
* Akses ChatGPT dari popup ekstensi
* Render Markdown
* Sorotan kode
* Mode gelap
* Umpan balik untuk meningkatkan ChatGPT
* Mode pemicu kustom
* Salin ke clipboard

-----FAQ:-----

1. Apa itu ChatGPT?
ChatGPT adalah model bahasa yang dikembangkan oleh OpenAI, itu adalah jenis AI yang mampu memahami dan menghasilkan teks yang menyerupai manusia. Telah dilatih pada sejumlah besar data teks dari internet, sehingga memiliki pemahaman yang baik tentang berbagai topik dan dapat melakukan berbagai tugas pemrosesan bahasa alami seperti terjemahan bahasa, ringkasan teks, dan penyelesaian teks. Pada dasarnya, ini adalah program komputer yang dapat berkomunikasi dengan orang dengan cara yang terasa alami dan menyerupai manusia.

2. Apa itu ChatGPT for Google?
ChatGPT for Google adalah ekstensi browser yang meningkatkan mesin pencari dengan kekuatan ChatGPT. Ini bekerja dengan menunjukkan respons ChatGPT bersamaan dengan hasil mesin pencari normal.

3. Apakah ChatGPT for Google gratis untuk digunakan?
Ya, ekstensi ini gratis untuk digunakan.

4. Mesin pencari apa yang didukung?
Saat ini, ChatGPT for Google mendukung Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, dan lebih banyak mesin pencari.

5. Apakah saya memerlukan akun ChatGPT/OpenAI?
Ya, Anda perlu memiliki akun ChatGPT untuk menggunakan ekstensi ini. Anda dapat membuat akun secara gratis di chat.openai.com.

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Display ChatGPT response alongside search engine results

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AI/ChatGPT Lessons - Using ChatGPT in the Classroom (Shared)

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Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT 

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Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT 

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Including 10 AI-ready assignment and activity ideas.

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Cheating With ChatGPT: Can OpenAI’s Chatbot Pass AP Lit? | WSJ - YouTube

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Cheating With ChatGPT: Can OpenAI’s Chatbot Pass AP Lit? | WSJ - YouTube

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Cheating With ChatGPT: Can OpenAI’s Chatbot Pass AP Lit? | WSJ

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Mapping the Generative AI landscape | Antler

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Mapping the Generative AI landscape | Antler

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This report is a deep dive into the world of Gen-AI-and the first comprehensive market map available to everybody. We provide an overview of over 160 platforms in the space and their investors, as well as insights from leading thought leaders on the potential of this technology. This hands readers a unique opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of the generative AI market and the potential for new players to challenge established players like Google.

‍

"Generative AI is a foundational technology, and as always with these new platforms, the opportunities that it opens are ample-we passed the stage of "if" and we are at the stage of "when" and "how." We are seeing the infrastructure layer maturing and democratizing as LLMs get open sourced, which accelerates the application layer.'' -Irina Elena Haivas, Investor and Partner at Atomico

‍

‍ Please note: The information provided in this piece is based on Antler's day zero investment approach and the support we provide to founders around the world. The platforms featured in our industry mapping are sourced from Crunchbase. It is worth noting that some of these platforms may intersect both AI and Gen-AI. If you believe your platform should be included in our future mappings, please reach out to us at Ollie.Forsyth@antler.co.

‍

What is Gen-AI?

Imagine a world where instead of spending days writing a blog post, a week creating a presentation, or several months on an academic paper, you can use generative assistant tools to complete your projects in minutes. These tools not only help us with our projects, but also support us in making better decisions.

Here is an example of how powerful Gen-AI platforms may become: For those familiar with our reports on The Creator Economy, imagine a world where creators can upload their content into any language and have their own voices used as the voiceover, instead of relying on robots or local translators. This is a brave new world where we have access to powerful tools that can save us countless hours and enhance our work.

"We're at an inflection point in generative AI, for two reasons: computers can create better than ever, and it's never been easier for people to interact with them.'' -Molly Welch, Investor at Radical Ventures.

"At Media Monks, we believe that Generative AI will have a significant impact on our industry, though it is difficult to imagine the real scope of this amazing technology. We have been researching Generative AI for about five years and the rate of innovation has become exponential. Advances in the technology are occurring within our production timelines, which range from 1-6 months. What this means is that tools we use at the beginning of a project are already obsolete by the time we go live." -Samuel Snider Held, Creative AI Designer & Engineer at Media Monks.

AI vs Generative AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad term that refers to any technology that is capable of intelligent behavior. This can include a wide range of technologies, from simple algorithms that can sort data, to more advanced systems that can mimic human-like thought processes.

Generative AI (Gen-AI), on the other hand, is a specific type of AI that is focused on generating new content, such as text, images, or music. These systems are trained on large datasets and use machine learning algorithms to generate new content that is similar to the training data. This can be useful in a variety of applications, such as creating art, music, or even generating text for chatbots.

In essence, AI is a broad term that encompasses many different technologies, while generative AI is a specific type of AI that focuses on creating new content.

The vast opportunity unfolding

It is likely that Gen-AI will have a significant impact on the creative industries in the future. While some creatives may be replaced by Gen-AI systems, others may find new opportunities to work with these systems or to create content that is enabled by Gen-AI. In many cases, it may actually enhance the work of creatives by enabling them to create more personalized or unique content, or to generate new ideas and concepts that may not have been possible without the use of AI.

One potential benefit of Gen-AI for creatives is that it can enable them to create content more quickly and efficiently. For example, a writer may be able to use a Gen-AI system to generate rough drafts of articles or stories, which they can then edit and refine. This can save time and allow creatives to focus on the most important aspects of their work.

"Generative AI is a huge wave that's going to create unavoidable ripples across almost all industries and for the vast majority of them, we think it'll be incredibly value-adding. We see the biggest opportunities as platform plays built on top of the underlying models, where UX, accessibility, and embeddedness will be key differentiators in this race. All of this needs to be powered by a killer go-to-market strategy and above all, speed! The next half-year will be pivotal.'' -Stephanie Chan, Investor at Samaipata Ventures.

The impact of Gen-AI

This technology can have many different impacts depending on how it is used. For example, Gen-AI can be used to create new content, such as music or images, which can be used for a variety of purposes such as providing the creatives with more flexibility and imagination. It can also be used to improve machine learning algorithms by generating new training data. Overall, the impact of Gen-AI is sure to be significant, as it has the potential to enable the creation of new and useful content and to improve the performance of machine learning systems.

"We are heading for a time when artificial intelligence is widely available. But being widely available and actually usable to achieve business outcomes are two very different things." -Dave Rogenmoser, CEO & Co-founder of Jasper.

How do the training models work in practice?

Gen-AI training models work by learning from a large dataset of examples and using that knowledge to generate new data that is similar to the examples in the training dataset. This is typically done using a type of machine learning algorithm known as a generative model. There are many different types of generative models, each of which uses a different approach to generating new data. Some common types of generative models include generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), and autoregressive models.

For instance, a generative model trained on a dataset of images of faces might learn the general structure and appearance of faces then use that knowledge to generate new, previously unseen faces that look realistic and plausible.

Generative models are used in a variety of applications, including image generation, natural language processing, and music generation. They are particularly useful for tasks where it is difficult or expensive to generate new data manually, such as in the case of creating new designs for products or generating realistic-sounding speech.

"These new foundational models as well as applications built on top accelerate the pace of many industries: generating creative content for gaming and social media companies, automating manual processes within enterprises, helping scale operations previously unimaginable such as movie, music, and comics production-the possibilities are endless.'' -Manjot Pahwa, Investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners

How are language models created?

There are several ways to create a language model, but the most common method involves using a machine learning algorithm to train the model on a large dataset of existing text. This process typically involves the following steps:

Collect a large dataset of existing text. This dataset should be representative of the language or style of text that you want your model to be able to generate.

Preprocess the text data to clean and prepare it for training. This typically involves tokenizing the text into individual words or phrases, and converting all of the words to lower case.

Train a machine learning algorithm on the preprocessed text data. This can be done using a variety of algorithms, including recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks.

Fine-tune the trained model by adjusting the model's parameters and hyperparameters, and by using additional training data if necessary.

Test the model by generating sample text using the trained model and evaluating the results. This can be done by comparing the generated text to the original training data, or by using other metrics such as perplexity or BLEU scores.

Refine the model by repeating steps 4 and 5 until the generated text is of high quality and matches the desired language or style.

"It is important to note that creating a language model requires significant computational resources and expertise in machine learning-although the space is still early, platforms are spending millions of dollars on fine tuning their products and services.

The current challenge for founders in the Generative AI category is to build not just a product, but also a defensible business model with the capacity to endure. Any competent developer can wrap an application skin around these underlying generative engines. The solution is to incorporate sustainable competitive differentiation through strategies like embedding network effects, raised switching costs, ingrained product partnerships, etc.'' -David Beisel, Partner at NextView Ventures.

Why does Gen-AI exist?

Gen-AI exists because it has the potential to solve many important problems and unlock the door to myriad new opportunities in a wide range of fields. Some of the key reasons why Gen-AI is a growing field of research and development include:

Gen-AI can create new content. One of the key benefits of Gen-AI is its ability to generate new content, such as text, images, or music. This can be used to create new art, music, and other forms of creative expression, and to generate data for training machine learning models.

Gen-AI can improve efficiency and productivity. By automating the generation of content, Gen-AI can help save time and reduce the need for manual labor. This can improve efficiency and productivity in a variety of fields, from journalism and content creation to data annotation and analysis.

Gen-AI can improve the quality of generated content. With advances in machine learning and natural language processing, Gen-AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of generating high-quality content that is difficult for humans to distinguish from real content.

Gen-AI can enable new applications and uses. The ability of Gen-AI to create new content opens up many possibilities for new applications and uses. For example, it can be used to create personalized experiences, such as personalized news articles or personalized music recommendations.

"This isn't as widely known. My opinion is that generative AI models are magical now because they've been able to take in people's inputs through language. And because they are able to represent so many different concepts-and combine them-they can make beautiful, wild, and creative results. It's exciting, thrilling, and perhaps a little scary. For creatives, this means finding inspiration with a muse, creating prototypes faster, and refining pieces with the combined skill of the model (Photoshop++).'' -Sharon Zhou.

Looking into the future-Gen-AI revenue models

There are several potential revenue models for companies that use Gen-AI technology. Some possible revenue streams include:

Licensing the technology to other companies or organizations that can use it to improve their products or services.

Selling the outputs of the AI system, such as generated images, videos, or text, to customers who can use them for various purposes.

Providing access to the AI system as a subscription service, where customers can use it to generate their own outputs

Using the AI system to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of a company's existing products or services, and then charging customers for those enhanced offerings.

Creating new products or services that leverage the capabilities of the AI system, and selling those directly to customers.

Why now?

There are several reasons why now is the time for Gen-AI. First, advances in machine learning and natural language processing have made it possible for AI systems to generate high-quality, human-like content. Second, the growing demand for personalized and unique content, such as in the fields of art, marketing, and entertainment, has increased the need for Gen-AI platforms. Third, the availability of large amounts of data and powerful computational resources has made it possible to train and deploy these types of models at scale.

"There has been a promise that AI is going to change the world and we've been waiting for it since 2012. In the past two or three years, something has finally changed. While recent excitement around generative AI has been text-to-image, I believe AI-powered text generation will prove to be far more transformative. And now, with increased access to cutting-edge language models, we are seeing this technology proliferate into everyday products-completely changing the way companies do business and reimagining how humans experience technology." -Aidan Gomez, co-founder & CEO at Cohere.

Read our full list of Gen-AI startups (updated regularly)

Description of Gen-AI landscape categories:

Text: Summarizing or automating content.

Images: Generating images.

Audio: Summarizing, generating or converting text in audio.

Video: Generating or editing videos.

Code: Generating code.

Chatbots: Automating customer service and more.

ML platforms: Applications / ML platforms.

Search: AI-powered insights.

Gaming: Gen-AI gaming studios or applications.

Data: Designing, collecting, or summarizing data.

The Gen-AI fundraising landscape

With a number of investors focused on the Gen-AI space, we have shortlisted the most active ones:

A select handful of investors investing in the Gen-AI space. These investors may also invest in later- or earlier-stage companies.

The Gen-AI unicorn landscape

Although the sector is still emerging, a few unicorns are already emerging. Two unicorns were produced in 2019, one in 2020, and four in 2022 thus far.

Trends:

How is Gen-AI being used for arts and music?

Gen-AI is being used in art and music in a few different ways. One common application is using generative models to create new art and music, either by generating completely new works from scratch or by using existing works as a starting point and adding new elements to them. For example, a generative model might be trained on a large dataset of paintings and then be used to generate new paintings that are similar to the ones in the dataset, but are also unique and original.

How is Gen-AI being used for gaming?

Gen-AI is being used in gaming in a number of ways, including to create new levels or maps, to generate new dialogue or story lines, and to create new virtual environments. For example, a game might use a Gen-AI model to create a new, unique level for a player to explore each time they play, or to generate new dialogue options for non-player characters based on the player's actions. Additionally, Gen-AI can be used to create new, realistic virtual environments for players to explore, such as cities, forests, or planets. Overall, it can be used to add a level of dynamism and variety to gaming experiences, making them more engaging and immersive for players.

'"Generally, the short-term innovation areas will be extremely positive. Games and online 3D experiences have been notoriously hard to build-Generative AI will completely upend that by making it exponentially easier to create game assets. The potential downsides, or rather consequences, of applying Generative AI in gaming is more existential. While single dimension applications like AI-generated copywriting or image creation are merely amplifiers of existing tasks we perform and still allows us to control the application of the output (i.e., we can decide to to accept/reject a piece of copy and decide where to use the copy), our interactions with AI in gaming will be much more multidimensional. Over time, AI (whether it's environmental, behavioral, or NPC characters) will evolve and adapt to human heeds and likewise, humans will get used to socializing and regularly interacting in these AI-generated realms.'' -Annie Zhang at Roblox.

How will Gen-AI impact the creator economy?

With The Creator Economy already a $100 billion dollar industry poised for continuous disruption, Gen-AI is likely to have a significant impact on creatives-especially those creating music, art, or writing. However, it does present the opportunity for creators to be global from day one, allowing their content to be turned into any language using the creators voice or turning their creativity into more engaging content.

"Generative AI will turn creators into super-heroes and will augment areas where they aren't as strong. Think of it more as a creator co-pilot, rather than a creator replacement." -Jim Louderback, Author of Inside The Creator Economy.

For the creator economy to succeed, platforms will need to adapt to the creators' personalities so the creators have some form of connection with their fans when the content may have been mostly supported with AI platforms.

''I'd argue that the human element is essential for art to have value. When AI-generated art is created by algorithms and machines, rather than by individuals with their own experiences, emotions, and perspectives, it can be seen as lacking the authenticity and humanity that are often seen as essential to great art. This can make it difficult for some viewers to connect with AI-generated art on an emotional level, which can reduce its impact and significance.'' -Ivona Tau, creator.

However when we ask a creator what impact Gen-AI will have on them, one creator said:

"Not much. That said, I'm watching what's happening with great interest. I'm truly inspired by the results other people are getting with the help of generative models. You often hear artists call AI image models as 'tools,' but AI is so much more than a tool. It's a creative partner, a synthetic genie, or an inspirational ally.'' -James Gurney, artist.

What does the future hold for the space and what challenges might it face?

There are many challenges that lie ahead for Gen-AI, including improving the quality and diversity of the outputs produced by these models, increasing the speed at which they can generate outputs, and making them more robust and reliable. Another major challenge is to develop generative Gen-AI models that are better able to understand and incorporate the underlying structure and context of the data they are working with, in order to produce more accurate and coherent outputs. Additionally, there are also ongoing concerns about the ethical and societal implications of generative AI, and how to ensure that these technologies are used in a responsible and beneficial way.

Let's take a closer look at a number of these concerns:

‍ Copyright. As of today it's challenging to see how these platforms identify the original source of truth or where artwork came from - the models are trained by hundreds of millions of data points. Creators are concerned about how these platforms will be able to mitigate copyright infringement of the creators' work. As we saw with a recent case-tweeted by Lauryn Ipsum -there are images being used in the Lensa app that have backgrounds of the original artist's signature.

"One of the most pressing issues in generative AI right now is system trustworthiness. Large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT are prone to sharing incorrect or false responses. In image generation, where systems have been trained on large volumes of imagery, there are copyright and intellectual property questions around system outputs, making enterprise users uncertain about integrating them into products or workflows.'' -Molly Welch, investor at Radical Ventures.

‍ Students writing their dissertations. As these platforms become smarter, young savvy students will adopt them in their daily lives. How will this impact their academic work and how will their professors be able to identify if this is truly their work? Gen-AI will have a huge impact on the education space that remains to be seen.

"The opportunities for students to use chatGPT to supplement their learning is endless, assuming that the ChatGPT model continues to improve. Students can use it to generate content for quizzes and flashcards to help them study, optimize existing code, or even write summaries for study guides. The key word here is supplement. Students should use ChatGPT in addition to their own original work they're already putting in. ChatGPT can be problematic when students use the content as a replacement for their work or even submit ChatGPT content as their own original thought. University administration and students need to work together to build policy to clearly state what is acceptable in this new world. I took an open-book exam last week that explicitly prohibited the use of ChatGPT or any other AI support." -Cherie Lou, creator and student at Stanford University.

‍ Disinformation vs misinformation. Although these systems are insanely smart, they will inevitably provide misinformation at times. For example, in a recent Channel 4 interview in the UK, the host was asking the Open AI about his career path, and the chat-bot assistant gave inaccurate information. As the training models become more adaptive and learn more about us, in time there will be fewer mistakes in the algorithms.

Drawbacks of Gen-AI include:

The risk of bias in the generated data, if the training data is not diverse or representative enough.

Concerns about the potential for generative AI to replace human labor in certain industries, leading to job loss.

The potential for Gen-AI to be used for malicious purposes, such as creating fake news or impersonating individuals.

It's possible Gen-AI will replace millions of jobs from designers to producers to artists; however, creatives will always exist in some aspect.

Gen-AI will impact the metaverse-exactly how remains to be seen.

It is difficult to predict exactly how generative AI will impact the metaverse, as the latter is still a largely theoretical concept and there is no consensus on what it will look like or how it will function. However, Gen-AI will play a significant role in its creation and development, as it will allow for the automatic generation of content and experiences within the virtual world. This could potentially lead to a more immersive and dynamic metaverse, with a virtually limitless supply of new and unique experiences for users to enjoy. It is also possible that Gen-AI could be used to automate various tasks within the metaverse, such as managing virtual economies and ensuring that the virtual world remains stable and functional. Overall, the impact of Gen-AI on the metaverse is likely to be significant and wide-ranging.

"There will be business opportunities in different layers of the AI stack, and we are already seeing some business models emerging. Obviously it's very expensive and complex to produce foundation models like GPT-3, and the few companies that can do it will be paid handsomely. But there are countless opportunities to develop more specialized models and to bundle general capabilities into something that a particular target market needs. This is the equivalent of vertical SaaS, applied to AI. We are probably going to see a lot of AI-enabled SaaS plays that provide a holistic solution with great UX for a particular market.Further down in the stack, providing the right kind of training data, enabling ML engineers to build specialized models quickly and assuring the robustness of models are all very viable businesses.'' -Andreas Goeldi, Partner at BTOV Ventures.

Let's shape the future together

Get ready for a technology shift that will revolutionize the future of work! We are on the brink of a new era in which thousands of jobs will be transformed and new ones created. These cutting-edge Gen-AI platforms will undoubtedly support and enhance our daily lives, but it will take time for us to fully adapt to them.

"This unprecedented level of human-machine collaboration is in full swing and the game is now open to whoever will take the lead in fully integrating the generative AI method, regardless of the industry you are in.'' -Gabrielle Chou, Associate Professor at New York University, Shanghai.

If you're building the next generation of Gen-AI platforms, we would love to meet you and learn more about your work. Let's shape the future together!

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Mapping the Generative AI landscape | Antler

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This report is a deep dive into the world of Gen-AI-and the first comprehensive market map available to everybody. We provide an overview of over 160 platforms in the space and their investors, as well as insights from leading thought leaders on the potential of this technology.

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Sign up for Ellie - Your AI Email Assistant

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Sign up for Ellie - Your AI Email Assistant

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Ellie learns from your writing style and crafts replies as if they were written by you

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Ellie learns from your writing style and crafts replies as if they were written by you 😻 Enjoy 40% off all plans with the promo code PH40OFF Available until the end of 2022! 🔥 Ellie takes context from the email thread to craft intelligent replies. We promise you'll be blown away by Ellie's responses!

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Yes, Teachers, You Should Be Panicking About AI

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Yes, Teachers, You Should Be Panicking About AI

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In our final unit of the previous school year, I introduced our multi-genre projects-in which students are asked to synthesize "genres" of narrative, analytical and creative writing alongside audio and visual components-with a simple rationale:

Especially for education.

However, when discussing this online and in-person with other teachers, I find myself to be the outlier. Most educators seem only mildly concerned, if at all-even those who have spent time with it seem to be more focused on nitpicking its current shortcomings rather than, in my eyes, reasonably considering the seismic impact this will have on what education is.

My panic level, someone asked?

"A 12/10," I answered. And that's probably understating it.

I hope I'm just another version of William Blake's "voice crying alone in the wilderness," but I don't think I am.

Here's are six reasons why:

One of the more common reactions I saw online over the past week was for teachers to speculate about how the ChatGPT examples lacked the nuance and authenticity of actual student writing-and I'm sure many of those teachers, like I do myself, immediately pictured the most memorable writing samples from students who walked into the classroom with that uncanny ability to breathe their own voice into whatever writing they were asked to do.

"Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I've given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot's results don't exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task." -Daniel Herman

Simply put, a lot of what we do as teachers is about helping students build the skills to respond within expectations and constraints-expectations and constraints often that are meant to help "prepare them" for later expectations and constraints, within the education system and beyond them.

Standardized tests are a part of this-more on that in a later rationale in this post-but so is the very understandable fact that part of communication is learning to do so within shared norms and contexts that everyone adheres to, relatively speaking.
And that, unfortunately, is the exact type of thing that this type of program can already do.
Want to see an example? Below is a prompt that sophomores completed a few weeks back in their rhetorical appeals mini-unit that I simply copied/pasted-without making any edits!-into the ChatGPT program:

In seconds, this was the result. (Oh, and I just did a screenshot of the first part of the post-ChatGPT actually knocked out all three appeals with a concluding paragraph)

Are there some prompts this program currently struggles more with, especially with newer articles it cannot currently look up? (It is limited from searching for anything more recent than 2021 publishing at the moment.) Certainly. But even on its worse efforts, you can then give it more specific instructions or additional information and get something reasonable. Or even proficient, as the above-example demonstrates.

Perfect? Of course not-but that leads to my second concern...

Think about the students who have fallen behind and have piles of make-up work to get through, or those who have been finding ways to "get by" for years while being significantly-below-grade level as readers. Think about students who struggle with dyslexia or a host of other disabilities that make the writing process 10x longer and more challenging for them than the average student-not to mention those who are arriving at English as a second language and trying to play "catch-up" with peers.
Just to be incredibly clear about this, too, plagiarism software cannot check this.
(Could you interview a student and maybe coax an admission out of them if the writing was too dissimilar from previous writing samples? Perhaps. But are you going to do that for all 100-200 of your students on every constructed response? I don't think so-and that's not even considering that, once these tools become normed, there will be no lower-level previous writing samples to compare to for many...)

Fact: standardized testing already drives so much of what education looks like in our country, and increasingly has done so since the implementation of No Child Left Behind a little over two decades ago.

Fact: standardized testing relies primarily on multiple-choice questions for efficiency and cost-saving purposes-something I have been highly critical of as this is an inferior way of assessing learning.

How do I know? Well, I asked our good friend ChatGPT:

I repeat: "allowing for faster turnaround times and potentially more test-takers."

In other words, more tests and more money. Brilliant.

However, as Jim and I discussed in our most recent podcast before the release of ChatGPT (wasn't our timing pretty incredible?), even the types of tests that we think of as "upper-level" such as AP Exams confine students to rubrics that are essentially "boxes" that you train students to write towards-knowing that the human graders are crammed into rooms trying to speed through thousands upon thousands of them each summer as efficiently as possible.

And that is where I take an even deeper gulp, because the infusion of artificial intelligence in these high-stakes tests will very likely increase the incentive for these tests to be even more "standardized" in the types of writing they expect from students.

Concerned yet?

If not, how about this:

Okay, that is an overstatement.

But already many of you reading this post know exactly how a considerable portion of teachers will respond to the proliferation of this technology into the hands of students:

"Computers and phones away," they'll say. "Pencils out, paper out. Here we go!"

Trust me, especially after nearly a year of teaching over Zoom, I recognize the value of making learning tangible- remember, I'm the guy who has students physically mindmap their reflections every two weeks, right?-but I also have a major problem when we implement and require a form of nostalgia rather than preparing students for the world we are already in.

This is not a fight we will win, no matter how many millions districts will invest in "AI-detecting software" (and yes, for-profit "education" companies will find a way to make far too much money off this, too) or how many reams of notebook paper are wasted in the futile fight against a technology that very much needs to be collaborated with rather than combatted against.

Nevertheless, after a decade of getting to know educators and already hearing the conversations out there, there will be a sizable contingent that decides to wage this war-and, in doing so, will widen the already-wide gap between the education experience we provide to students and the world they are already in the process of inheriting.

So yeah, I'm concerned. The realistic (and, in this case, quite cynical) part of me is fairly confident that the way we respond to artificial intelligence as an education system, especially in the years ahead when it becomes normed and advanced, is going to do much more harm than good.

Speaking of harm, though...

If you aren't convinced yet, take an imaginative stroll with me.

You are a parent of a student who is about to enter high school, well aware that the academic success of your student in these formative years often can create a direct line to status and opportunities afforded to them after high school and throughout the rest of their lives. How they do in high school quite often shapes the rest of their life.

Luckily, you have the financial means to purchase an artificial intelligence software program for your student that is far superior to those available open-source, and you are fully aware that your student will benefit in major ways academically from this and that many of their peers already have this program at their disposal.

Do you purchase it?

Of course, the answer is yes-just like so many with means pay for personalized tutoring, additional test prep courses, summer programs aligned to admission criteria, as well as so many other advantages they "pay for" invisibly as far as the advantages their students have in not having to work that extra job or not having to babysit for siblings or not having to deal with food insecurity, temporary homelessness, or the myriad other obstacles that students they sit in class next to face-that is, of course, if you haven't already purchased the advantage of an entirely-separate private school experience for them, too.

We already know that companies like Google have better artificial intelligence technology than the open-source offerings like ChatGPT, so I think it is very fair to assume that the "open access" tools will not be able to keep pace with those higher-quality versions available...for a price.

I'd call that concerning.

But then there's the final concern that, quite honestly, I think you're foolish not to admit to...

And then again, here:

And can be.

But what happens when ChatGPT and the myriad superior iterations to come after it starts approaching this level, and then moves beyond it?

That can't happen, though, right?

There's an understandable, defensive arrogance coming from so many educators right now, pointing out the flaws of the current iteration and clinging with either a conscious or unconscious desperation to a normalcy, I'd argue, that now ought to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with nostalgia.

Chess players scoffed at the skill of artificial intelligence at one time, too, right?

This is why I'm trying to approach this with utmost humility, as I don't think-even in my clearly-outlier alarm-raising-that I have a grasp of how much of a paradigm shift this will ultimately be.

I did take some time today, though, to play with the narrative prompts students will have in front of them this week-the same prompt that led to the poignant student poetry showcased above. Here is a complete (silent) video clip of me messing around with this tool today during my lunch break.

This stanza midway through of course sent shivers down my spine:
But I cannot stand the ocean,
The way it roars and crashes,
The way it pulls me in and threatens to swallow me whole.
The final couplet that it arrived at, though, after some poking and prodding as I tried to see how little effort it took to "personalize" a poem using this tool, felt like ChatGPT was talking to all of us educators in this moment:

Level of concern being a 12/10 feels like a drastic understatement for this moment, I reckon. I hope I'm wrong about the paradigm shift and our lack of preparation for this moment in education, but I don't think I am.

Like all other things education, people are going to have vastly different opinions and will enter into those conversations with divergent lived experiences and values, too. These won't be easy conversations and consensus is hard to imagine any time soon.

But not talking about this isn't a solution, either, so I'd prefer the hard conversation rather than the silent one.

In the meantime...

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Yes, Teachers, You Should Be Panicking About AI

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Six reasons I am "planting my flag" that artificial intelligence's development is going to drastically change education-and that we aren't even close to prepared for it

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Examples of what you can do with OpenAI 

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Examples of what you can do with OpenAI 

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An API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI

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So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

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So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

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Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

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Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

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Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Afternoon, #OntEd!

So we need to start talking impact of #GPT3 on pedagogy, on curriculum, and definitely on assessment. 

Truthfully? 

We needed to be talking about this last year but things have been kind of "dumpster firey", so let's not be too harsh on ourselves.

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ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about OpenAI's GPT-3 tool | BBC Science Focus Magazine

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ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about OpenAI's GPT-3 tool | BBC Science Focus Magazine

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OpenAI has quickly become one of the biggest names in tech. The artificial intelligence (AI) company has made realistic image generators, 3D-model creators and, the thing it is now best-known for, ChatGPT.

With the power to pass legal exams, write entire feature-length articles, and even code full websites, ChatGPT has people talking about the power of AI.

Now, the company has announced a new major upgrade to the software behind ChatGPT. While the program has been running on technology known as GPT-3, OpenAI has now officially launched GPT-4.

While they are not exactly catchy names, GPT-3 and now 4 are actually the internet's best-known language-processing AI models. Since ChatGPT was announced, it has been banned in select schools and utilised by major companies like Microsoft.

Now, the company has also introduced a pay-to-use version called ChatGPT Pro. This offers users a host of added benefits for $20 (£16) a month, including priority access, faster load times, and now access to GPT-4.

So what is ChatGPT? What does it do? And is this really the future of AI? We've answered these questions and more down below.

What is GPT-3, GPT-4 and ChatGPT?

GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) and GPT-4 are state-of-the-art language processing AI models developed by OpenAI. They are capable of generating human-like text and have a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modelling, and generating text for applications such as chatbots. GPT-3 is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to date, with 175 billion parameters.

Its most common use so far is creating ChatGPT - a highly capable chatbot. To give you a little taste of its most basic ability, we asked GPT-3's chatbot to write its own description as you can see above. It's a little bit boastful, but completely accurate and arguably very well written.

More like this

In less corporate terms, GPT-3 gives a user the ability to give a trained AI a wide range of worded prompts. These can be questions, requests for a piece of writing on a topic of your choosing or a huge number of other worded requests.

Above, it described itself as a language processing AI model. This simply means it is a program able to understand human language as it is spoken and written, allowing to understand the worded information it is fed, and what to spit back out.

How much does ChatGPT cost and how can you use it?

ChatGPT is very easy to sign up for and use, simply:

head over to the ChatGPT website and create an account.

You'll need to wait until your account has been accepted (you can skip this step if you have an account from Dall-E 2).

Logging in will present you with a very simple page. You are offered some example prompts, and some information about how ChatGPT works.

At the bottom of the page is a text box. This is where you can ask ChatGPT any of your questions or prompts.

Currently, ChatGPT remains free-to-use software. However, OpenAI has now announced ChatGPT Pro - a pay-to-use version with added benefits.

This version of the software will cost $20 (£16) a month, offering users priority access, quicker load times and access to updates and new features before anyone else.

For now the free version remains but it is unclear if this will change in the future.

How is GPT-4 different to GPT-3?

In essence, GPT-4 is the same as its predecessor GPT-3. However, there are some new features that boost the software's abilities.

Mainly, GPT-4 includes the ability to drastically increase the number of words that can be used in an input... up to 25,000, 8 times as many as the original ChatGPT model.

Equally, OpenAI has stated that the latest version of their technology makes fewer mistakes that they are calling 'hallucinations'. Previously, ChatGPT could become confused, offering up a nonsensical answer to your question, or even inputting stereotypes or false information.

Additionally, GPT-4 is better at playing with language and expressing creativity. In OpenAI's demonstration of the new technology, ChatGPT was asked to summarise a blog post only using words that start with the letter 'g'. It also has a better understanding of how to write poetry or creative writing, but it is still by no means perfect.

On top of this, OpenAI also displayed the potential of using images to initialise prompts. For example, the team showed an image of a fridge full of ingredients with the prompt "what can I make with these products?". ChatGPT then returned a step-by-step recipe.

While it wasn't demonstrated, OpenAI is also proposing the use of video for prompts. This would, in theory, allow users to input videos with a worded prompt for the language model to digest.

Creating recipes with images is a clever use of the technology, but it is only the tip of how images could be used with ChatGPT. The company also demonstrated the ability to create a whole website that successfully ran JavaScript with just a handwritten sketch of a website.

As a tool to complete jobs normally done by humans, GPT-3 was mostly competing with writers and journalists. However, GPT-4 is being shown to have the ability to create websites, complete tax returns, make recipes and deal with reams of legal information.

Concerns for the future

A general apprehension has followed artificial intelligence throughout its history and things are no different with ChatGPT. Critics have been quick to raise the alarms over this technology, but now even those closest to it are utilising caution.

An open letter has been drafted calling for all AI labs to pause for at least six months on the development of systems more powerful than GPT-4. This would include OpenAI's work on GPT-5 - the next version of technology ChatGPT will eventually run on.

This open letter has been signed by prominent AI researchers, as well as figures within the tech industry including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari.

This letter states that the pause should be public and verifiable, arguing that companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are entering a profit-driven race to develop and release new AI models at a dangerous pace.

This comes at the same time as a report from Goldman Sachs that suggested 300 million full-time jobs could be impacted by AI systems like ChatGPT, escalating existing concerns around these platforms.

Along with both of these events, Italy also became the first country to ban ChatGPT. This was, however, due to concerns over the processing and storage of data used to train the platform. While Italy is the only country to take such action so far, both the UK and a collection of EU countries have raised concerns around the platform.

When will GPT-4 be available?

Now that GPT-4 has been announced, when will you be able to use the latest version of ChatGPT? At first, the GPT-4 version of ChatGPT will be available to people on the Pro version of the software (a $20/month premium plan).

This plan is currently only available via a waiting list with a pretty long queue. However, it does come with other benefits like availability when demand is high and faster response speeds.

Whether or not the free version will get updated is unclear right now. If OpenAI does decide to update the free plan to GPT-4, it likely won't be for quite a while.

Alternatively, Microsoft's new version of Bing is currently running GPT-4. This also has a waitlist to join but unlike ChatGPT Pro, this is free-to-use.

Where will GPT-4 be used?

GPT-3 was already being adapted by a lot of big companies, inputting the technology into search engines, apps and software, but OpenAI seems to be pushing GPT-4 even harder.

Microsoft's Bing is the main user of the technology right now, but OpenAI has reported that the software is being used by companies like Khan Academy to help students with coursework and give teachers ideas for lessons.

Equally, the language-learning app Duolingo has got involved with something called 'Duolingo Max' with two features. One will help explain why your answer to a question was right or wrong, the other will setup role plays with an AI to play out language in different scenarios.

More companies are adopting this technology, including the payment processing company Stripe and customer service brand Intercom.

What can it do?

With its 175 billion parameters, its hard to narrow down what GPT-3 does. The model is, as you would imagine, restricted to language. It can't produce video, sound or images like its brother Dall-E 2, but instead has an in-depth understanding of the spoken and written word.

This gives it a pretty wide range of abilities, everything from writing poems about sentient farts and cliché rom-coms in alternate universes, through to explaining quantum mechanics in simple terms or writing full-length research papers and articles.

While it can be fun to use OpenAI's years of research to get an AI to write bad stand-up comedy scripts or answer questions about your favourite celebrities, its power lies in its speed and understanding of complicated matters.

Where we could spend hours researching, understanding and writing an article on quantum mechanics, ChatGPT can produce a well-written alternative in seconds.

It has its limitations and its software can be easily confused if your prompt starts to become too complicated, or even if you just go down a road that becomes a little bit too niche.

Equally, it can't deal with concepts that are too recent. World events that have occurred in the past year will be met with limited knowledge and the model can produce false or confused information occasionally.

OpenAI is also very aware of the internet and its love of making AI produce dark, harmful or biased content. Like its Dall-E image generator before, ChatGPT will stop you from asking the more inappropriate questions or for help with dangerous requests.

How does it work?

On the face of it, GPT-3's technology is simple. It takes your requests, questions or prompts and quickly answers them. As you would imagine, the technology to do this is a lot more complicated than it sounds.

The model was trained using text databases from the internet. This included a whopping 570GB of data obtained from books, webtexts, Wikipedia, articles and other pieces of writing on the internet. To be even more exact, 300 billion words were fed into the system.

As a language model, it works on probability, able to guess what the next word should be in a sentence. To get to a stage where it could do this, the model went through a supervised testing stage.

Here, it was fed inputs, for example "What colour is the wood of a tree?". The team has a correct output in mind, but that doesn't mean it will get it right. If it gets it wrong, the team inputs the correct answer back into the system, teaching it correct answers and helping it build its knowledge.

It then goes through a second similar stage, offering multiple answers with a member of the team ranking them from best to worst, training the model on comparisons.

What sets this technology apart is that it continues to learn while guessing what the next word should be, constantly improving its understanding of prompts and questions to become the ultimate know-it-all.

Think of it as a very beefed-up, much smarter version of the autocomplete software you often see in email or writing software. You start typing a sentence and your email system offers you a suggestion of what you are going to say.

Are there any other AI language generators?

While GPT-3 has made a name for itself with its language abilities it isn't the only artificial intelligence capable of doing this. Google's LaMDA made headlines when a Google engineer was fired for calling it so realistic that he believed it to be sentient.

There are also plenty of other examples of this software out there created by everyone from Microsoft to Amazon and Stanford University. These have all received a lot less attention than OpenAI or Google, possibly because they don't offer up fart jokes or headlines about sentient AI.

Most of these models are not available to the public, but OpenAI has begun opening up access to GPT-3 during its test process, and Google's LaMDA is available to selected groups in a limited capacity for testing.

Google breaks its Chatbot down into talking, listing and imagining, providing demos of its abilities in these areas. You can ask it to imagine a world where snakes rule the world, ask it to generate a list of steps to learn to ride a unicycle, or just have a chat about the thoughts of dogs.

Where ChatGPT thrives and fails

The GPT-3 software is obviously impressive, but that doesn't mean it is flawless. Through the ChatGPT function, you can see some of its quirks.

Most obviously, the software has a limited knowledge of the world after 2021. It isn't aware of world leaders that came into power since 2021, and won't be able to answer questions about recent events.

This is obviously no surprise considering the impossible task of keeping up with world events as they happen, along with then training the model on this information.

Equally, the model can generate incorrect information, getting answers wrong or misunderstanding what you are trying to ask it.

If you try and get really niche, or add too many factors to a prompt, it can become overwhelmed or ignore parts of a prompt completely.

For example, if you ask it to write a story about two people, listing their jobs, names, ages and where they live, the model can confuse these factors, randomly assigning them to the two characters.

Equally, there are a lot of factors where ChatGPT is really successful. For an AI, it has a surprisingly good understanding of ethics and morality.

When offered a list of ethical theories or situations, ChatGPT is able to offer a thoughtful response on what to do, considering legality, people's feelings and emotions and the safety of everyone involved.

It also has the ability to keep track of the existing conversation, able to remember rules you've set it, or information you've given it earlier in the conversation.

Two areas the model has proved to be strongest are its understanding of code and its ability to compress complicated matters. ChatGPT can make an entire website layout for you, or write an easy-to-understand explanation of dark matter in a few seconds.

Where ethics and artificial intelligence meet

Artificial intelligence and ethical concerns go together like fish and chips or Batman and Robin. When you put technology like this in the hands of the public, the teams that make them are fully aware of the many limitations and concerns.

Because the system is trained largely using words from the internet, it can pick up on the internet's biases, stereotypes and general opinions. That means you'll occasionally find jokes or stereotypes about certain groups or political figures depending on what you ask it.

For example, when asking the system to perform stand-up comedy, it can occasionally throw in jokes about ex-politicians or groups who are often featured in comedy bits.

Equally, the models love of internet forums and articles also gives it access to fake news and conspiracy theories. These can feed into the model's knowledge, sprinkling in facts or opinions that aren't exactly full of truth.

In places, OpenAI has put in warnings for your prompts. Ask how to bully someone, and you'll be told bullying is bad. Ask for a gory story, and the chat system will shut you down. The same goes for requests to teach you how to manipulate people or build dangerous weapons.

Will ChatGPT be banned in schools?

While a number of companies are looking to implement ChatGPT, in other areas it is quickly being banned.

In New York, the city's education department has ruled that the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York public schools.

There are two main reasons for this decision. First, the chat model has been shown to make mistakes and isn't always accurate, especially with information from the past year.

Secondly, there is a real risk of plagiarism with students able to get ChatGPT to write their essays for them.

While New York is the first place to publicly ban the software, it is likely to be a decision made elsewhere too. However, some experts have argued that this software could actually enhance learning.

"ChatGPT and other AI-based language applications could be, and perhaps should be, integrated into school education. Not indiscriminately, but rather as a very intentional part of the curriculum. If teachers and students use AI tools like ChatGPT in service of specific teaching goals, and also learn about some of their ethical issues and limitations, that would be far better than banning them," says Kate Darling, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

"But, in absence of resources for teachers to familiarise themselves with the technology, schools may need to enact some policies restricting its use."

In this way, Darling emphasises a belief held by many in the world of artificial intelligence. Instead of ignoring or banning it, we should learn how to interact with it safely.

This is an opinion mirrored by Sam Illingworth, an associate professor in the department of Learning Enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University.

"AI is very much here to stay, so why try to fight it? These are tools that our students will be using in the workforce, so it seems very strange to say don't use them for three years, pretending they don't exist for now," says Illingworth.

"These are things that have the potential to reduce workload and improve efficiency, our responsibility as educators is to decide how to utilise it."

Artificially intelligent eco-systems

Artificial intelligence has been in use for years, but it is currently going through a stage of increased interest, driven by developments across the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft and just about every big name in tech.

However, it is OpenAI which has attracted the most attention recently. The company has now made an AI image generator, a highly intelligent chatbot, and is in the process of developing Point-E - a way to create 3D models with worded prompts.

In creating, training and using these models, OpenAI and its biggest investors have poured billions into these projects. In the long-run, it could easily be a worthwhile investment, setting OpenAI up at the forefront of AI creative tools.

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ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about OpenAI's GPT-4 tool

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OpenAI has quickly become one of the biggest names in tech. The artificial intelligence (AI) company has made realistic image generators, 3D-model creators and, the thing it is now best-known for, ChatGPT. With the power to pass legal exams, write entire feature-length articles, and even code full websites, ChatGPT has people talking about the power of AI.

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No, ChatGPT Is Not The End Of High School English. But Here’s The Useful Tool It Offers Teachers.

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No, ChatGPT Is Not The End Of High School English. But Here’s The Useful Tool It Offers Teachers.

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No, ChatGPT Is Not The End Of High School English. But Here’s The Useful Tool It Offers Teachers.

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English class is not dead; however, some teachers may need to do a bit of soul searching.

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"Augmenting the think-pair-share with ChatGPT 

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Augmenting the think-pair-share with ChatGPT could be one of the biggest tech-enabled leaps in pedagogy:
* Think
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Augmenting the think-pair-share with ChatGPT could be one of the biggest tech-enabled leaps in pedagogy:
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Augmenting the think-pair-share with ChatGPT could be one of the biggest tech-enabled leaps in pedagogy:
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Augmenting the think-pair-share with ChatGPT could be one of the biggest tech-enabled leaps in pedagogy:
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Augmenting the think-pair-share with ChatGPT could be one of the biggest tech-enabled leaps in pedagogy:
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New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment | Impact of Social Sciences

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New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment | Impact of Social Sciences

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AI tools are available today that can write compelling university level essays. Taking an example of sample essay produced by the GPT-3 transformer, Mike Sharples discusses the implications of this technology for higher education and argues that they should be used to enhance pedagogy, rather than accelerating an ongoing arms race between increasingly sophisticated fraudsters and fraud detectors.
With all the focus in artificial intelligence and education on AI personalised learning and tutoring systems, one AI technology has slipped by unnoticed. It could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity. It's called a Transformer, it acts as a universal language tool and it is set to disrupt education. Here's how.
The construct of "learning styles" is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience. Learning styles and learning modes In the 1970s, learning styles became an important feature of educational practice. In the 1990s, "learning modalities" became a major focus of learning style research. This is the idea that we process information in different ways. For example, some individuals may be auditory learners, benefiting from listening to lectures and using recorded materials. Others may be visual learners, who gain from using visual materials such as textbooks, handouts, and computer graphics. Still others may be kinesthetic learners, who benefit from learning by movement and doing. Numerous experiments have been conducted to test this idea, and a number of different classifications of learning modalities have been proposed. In a review of this research, Dunn and Dunn (1997) found that the evidence does not support the idea that people have a particular learning mode that is dominant or that they process information in a particular way. In their study, the authors found that when students were given a particular instructional treatment, they could be classified in a particular learning modality category. But when they were given a different instructional treatment, they were classified in a different category. In a follow-up study in which they gave students a number of instructional treatments, Dunn and Dunn found that students could be placed in a particular category in some treatments, but not others. Dunn and Dunn also found that the results varied by age. Older students generally fit the results of more than one modality, whereas younger students were more likely to fit the results of just one modality. This led them to conclude that style preferences are learned over the course of development. This is consistent with the idea that people are flexible in responding to the way they are taught. Dunn, R., & Dunn, K. (1997). Learning styles: Research and practice. Journal of Research in Education, 7(2), 139-151.
Take a minute to read this graduate student essay on the controversial topic of "learning styles". If this were your student, how would you assess the essay? What mark would you give? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

∞∞∞

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The entire "student essay" was written by a Transformer AI program, GPT-3. I gave it the prompt "The construct of 'learning styles' is problematic because" and it produced the rest, including headings and references. Plagiarism software will not detect essays written by Transformers, because the text is generated, not copied. A Google search of the essay shows that each sentence is original.

Note its reference for "Dunn and Dunn (1997)". There is a journal of Research in Education, but no issue 7(2) in 1997. Dunn and Dunn did publish on learning styles, but not in that journal. GPT-3 has fashioned a plausible-looking but fake reference. It has also invented a fictitious research study from Dunn and Dunn to critique learning styles.

Anyone can sign up for an account with the GPT-3 Transformer then go to its "Playground", type the opening words of an assignment, press Submit and let it do the rest. A student can now generate an entire essay or assignment in seconds, at a cost of around 1 US cent. Other companies and universities are developing Transformer systems that write in multiple languages and learn as they go.

Some Transformers, such as GPT-3, can filter bad language. But they are essentially amoral. They don't know what they have written - they can't reflect on their output. Can a powerful but amoral text generator be used for good in education? Here are some suggestions.
The essay discusses the idea of learning styles, and how they may be developed over time. It cites research by Dunn and Dunn which suggests that learning styles are not fixed, and that people can learn in different ways depending on the situation. The essay is well-organized and flows smoothly. It makes a clear argument and supports it with evidence from research. One potential criticism is that the essay does not discuss the implications of learning styles research, or how this research can be used to improve learning. However, this is not necessarily a flaw, as the essay is only meant to be a brief overview of the topic.
Just as a student can generate an essay in seconds, so a teacher can assess it. Add "Here is a short assessment of this student essay:" to the end of the text and GPT-3 writes a review.

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It does a reasonable job. The program transforms surface text into a review but it doesn't get to the essay's meaning, nor does it find the fake reference or the made-up research study.

Students will employ AI to write assignments. Teachers will use AI to assess them. Nobody learns, nobody gains. If ever there were a time to rethink assessment, it's now. Instead of educators trying to outwit AI Transformers, let's harness them for learning.

If Transformer AI systems have a lasting influence on education, maybe that will come from educators and policy makers having to rethink how to assess students

First, Transformers can quickly show students different ways to express ideas and structure assignments. A teacher can run a classroom exercise to generate a few assignments on a topic, then get students to critique them and write their own better versions.

Second, AI Transformers can be creativity tools. Each student writes a short story with an AI. The student writes the first paragraph, AI continues with the second, and so on. It's a good way to explore possibilities and overcome writer's block.
For more on AI Transformers and computers as story generators, see Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers, to be published by Routledge in July 2022.
Third, teachers can explore the ethics and limits of AI. How does it feel to interact with an expert wordsmith that has no morals and no experience of the world? Does a "deep neural network" have a mind, or is it just a big data processor?

Finally, as educators, if we are setting students assignments that can be answered by AI Transformers, are we really helping students learn? There are many better ways to assess for learning: constructive feedback, peer assessment, teachback. If Transformer AI systems have a lasting influence on education, maybe that will come from educators and policy makers having to rethink how to assess students, away from setting assignments that machines can answer, towards assessment for learning.

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New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment

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AI tools are available today that can write compelling university level essays. Taking an example of sample essay produced by the GPT-3 transformer, Mike Sharples discusses the implications of this technology for higher education and argues that they should be used to enhance pedagogy, rather than accelerating an ongoing arms race between increasingly sophisticated fraudsters and fraud detectors.

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Collaborative Creative Writing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT – @AndrewMayne

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Collaborative Creative Writing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT – @AndrewMayne

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Teaching and learning and  #chatgpt #ai #teachersoftiktok #teachingideas 

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ChatGPT Will End High-School English - The Atlantic

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ChatGPT Will End High-School English - The Atlantic

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This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, "No Fear Shakespeare" puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they're on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you're looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change.

I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it's a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I'm sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa's radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael's metaphysics in Moby-Dick.

To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill-whether it's for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.
Read: The college essay is dead
I've also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them-that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience's expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people's ears and things.

I don't know if either of those things is true anymore. It's no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I've given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot's results don't exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.

I mean, look at this: I asked the program to write me a playful, sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford. Here's an excerpt from its response:

In addition to cleaning, I also had the opportunity to interact with the animals. I was amazed at the transformation I saw in some of the pets who had been neglected or abused. With patience and care, they blossomed into playful and affectionate companions who were eager to give and receive love. I was also able to witness firsthand the process of selecting the right pet for the right family. Although it was bittersweet to see some animals leave the shelter, I knew that they were going to a loving home, and that was the best thing for them.

It also managed to compose a convincing 400-word "friendly" cover letter for an application to be a manager at Starbucks. But most jaw-dropping of all, on a personal level: It made quick work out of an assignment I've always considered absolutely "unhackable." In January, my junior English students will begin writing an independent research paper, 12 to 18 pages, on two great literary works of their own choosing-a tradition at our school. Their goal is to place the texts in conversation with each other and find a thread that connects them. Some students will struggle to find any way to bring them together. We spend two months on the paper, putting it together piece by piece.

I've fed GPT a handful of pairs that students have worked with in recent years: Beloved and Hamlet, The Handmaid's Tale and The Parable of the Sower, Homer's The Odyssey and Dante's Inferno. GPT brought them together instantly, effortlessly, uncannily: memory, guilt, revenge, justice, the individual versus the collective, freedom of choice, societal oppression. The technology doesn't go much beyond the surface, nor does it successfully integrate quotations from the original texts, but the ideas presented were on-target-more than enough to get any student rolling without much legwork.

It goes further. Last night, I received an essay draft from a student. I passed it along to OpenAI's bots. "Can you fix this essay up and make it better?" Turns out, it could. It kept the student's words intact but employed them more gracefully; it removed the clutter so the ideas were able to shine through. It was like magic.

I've been teaching for about 12 years: first as a TA in grad school, then as an adjunct professor at various public and private universities, and finally in high school. From my experience, American high-school students can be roughly split into three categories. The bottom group is learning to master grammar rules, punctuation, basic comprehension, and legibility. The middle group mostly has that stuff down and is working on argument and organization-arranging sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within an essay. Then there's a third group that has the luxury of focusing on things such as tone, rhythm, variety, mellifluence.

Whether someone is writing a five-paragraph essay or a 500-page book, these are the building blocks not only of good writing but of writing as a tool, as a means of efficiently and effectively communicating information. And because learning writing is an iterative process, students spend countless hours developing the skill in elementary school, middle school, high school, and then finally (as thousands of underpaid adjuncts teaching freshman comp will attest) college. Many students (as those same adjuncts will attest) remain in the bottom group, despite their teachers' efforts; most of the rest find some uneasy equilibrium in the second category.

Working with these students makes up a large percentage of every English teacher's job. It also supports a cottage industry of professional development, trademarked methods buried in acronyms ( ICE! PIE! EDIT! MEAT!), and private writing tutors charging $100-plus an hour. So for those observers who are saying, Well, good, all of these things are overdue for change -"this will lead to much-needed education reform," a former colleague told me-this dismissal elides the heavy toll this sudden transformation is going to take on education, extending along its many tentacles (standardized testing, admissions, educational software, etc.).

Perhaps there are reasons for optimism, if you push all this aside. Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise. Whatever is inimitable within them can be made conspicuous, freed from the troublesome mechanics of comma splices, subject-verb disagreement, and dangling modifiers.

But again, the majority of students do not see writing as a worthwhile skill to cultivate-just like I, sitting with my coffee and book, rereading Moby-Dick, do not consider it worthwhile to learn, say, video editing. They have no interest in exploring nuance in tone and rhythm; they will forever roll their eyes at me when I try to communicate the subtle difference, when writing an appositive phrase, between using commas, parentheses, or (the connoisseur's choice) the em dash.

Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence. After all, what is a cover letter? Its primary purpose isn't to communicate "I already know how to do this job" (because of course I don't) but rather "I am competent and trustworthy and can clearly express to you why I would be a good candidate for this job." What is a written exam? Its primary signal isn't "I memorized a bunch of information" but rather "I can express that information clearly in writing." Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now-maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class-but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn't "How will we get around this?" but rather "Is this still worth doing?"

I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us? Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?

Maybe the moment when I felt most caught between these two thoughts was when I asked GPT a question from an exam I give in my Eastern-philosophy course, something I've never imagined a student could find outside assistance to answer: "Explain the Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence, using a funny, specific example."

ChatGPT wrote back, as ever, instantly:

The Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence can be illustrated with a funny example: let's say you have a pet hamster. You might think that your hamster has its own inherent existence, but in reality, your hamster is made up of many different elements such as its fur, its bones, its muscles, and its brain. None of these elements exist independently or inherently on their own, so your hamster itself does not have any inherent existence either. The same goes for all phenomena-everything is made up of various components that don't have inherent existence, so nothing has any inherent existence either.

Everything is made up; it's true. The essay as a literary form? Made up. Grammatical rules as markers of intelligence? Writing itself as a technology? Made up. Starting now, OpenAI is forcing us to ask foundational questions about whether any of those things are worth keeping around.

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great literary works of their own choosing

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I've been teaching English for 12 years, and I'm astounded by what ChatGPT can produce.

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ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education - Ditch That Textbook

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ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education - Ditch That Textbook

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Now, we're wondering ...

Calculators.
Search engines.
Google Translate.
Wikipedia.
PhotoMath.#ChatGPT.

They disrupt traditional teaching.

We adapt. Education evolves forward.

Blocking them isn't the answer.

Making education more relevant is.
- Matt Miller (@jmattmiller) December 14, 2022

Jump straight to a section (click a button below):

⭐️ Add thoughts, ideas, resources in the comments at the bottom! ⭐️

Define: ChatGPT, GPT3, chatbots, and artificial intelligence.

These are some of the important things to understand as we wrap our brains around what this is and how to navigate it in the classroom.

I'll do plenty of my own human thinking and reasoning, but for the purposes of information, I'm going to let ChatGPT give us working definitions to use:

1. ChatGPT, what are you?

I am an artificial intelligence assistant trained by OpenAI to help answer questions and provide information on a wide variety of topics. I am not a physical being, but rather a program that is designed to process and generate text based on the input I receive. My primary function is to assist users like you by providing information and answering questions to the best of my ability. I have been designed to have a conversational style and can understand and respond to natural language input. I do not have personal experiences or feelings, and my responses are based solely on the information and knowledge that has been programmed into me. Is there anything else you would like to know?

2. What is GPT3?

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is a language generation model developed by OpenAI. It is a neural network-based machine learning model that is trained on a large dataset of text data to generate human-like text. GPT-3 has the ability to perform a wide range of language tasks, including translation, summarization, question answering, and text generation. It can be fine-tuned on specific tasks or used to generate text in a more general sense. GPT-3 has received a lot of attention due to its impressive performance on various language tasks and its ability to generate human-like text.

3. What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet. Chatbots are often used in customer service, marketing, and other areas where being able to communicate with customers or users in a natural, human-like way is important. Chatbots can be programmed to understand and respond to specific commands or questions, or they can be more general and able to hold a conversation with users on a wide range of topics. They can be integrated into websites, messaging apps, and other digital platforms, and they can be programmed to use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and respond to user input. Chatbots can be very useful for automating tasks and providing quick responses to frequently asked questions, but they are not as advanced as some other artificial intelligence (AI) systems and may not be able to hold more complex or nuanced conversations.

4. What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the ability of a computer or machine to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and more. There are several different approaches to building AI systems, including machine learning, where a system is trained on a dataset and can improve its performance over time, and rule-based systems, where the system follows a set of predetermined rules to make decisions. AI can be applied to a wide range of areas, including natural language processing, image and video recognition, robotics, and more. The goal of AI research is to create systems that can perform tasks at least as well as, or ideally better than, humans. AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries and transform the way we live and work, but it also raises important ethical and social questions.

What are the implications for the classroom?

As soon as the genie was out of the lamp, so to speak, there were effects of ChatGPT and AI on teaching and learning. Whether we felt those impacts right away or not, as soon as it was released, things have the potential to change. Below, we'll talk about ChatGPT in particular, but know that this is just the first one ... and we're thinking long-term about new products to come later.

1. Students can use ChatGPT to do their assignments.

There. I'll just say it clearly and plainly since we're all thinking it. For lots of assignment types (not all of them!), students can ask ChatGPT to do the work for them. They can copy/paste the work into a document or your learning management system and submit it.

2. TurnItIn and other plagiarism checkers can't catch it.

What ChatGPT creates is an original work each time you ask it. It creates something new every time you ask, and its responses are not in the databases of plagiarism checkers. ChatGPT doesn't keep a log of responses it creates, and even if it did, I'm thinking OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) has no incentive to make all of that available to plagiarism checkers. (Even if it did, the processing power necessary to query that database would be enormous.)

Some people will, undoubtedly, try to find ChatGPT detectors to track down students using it (in a similar way to plagiarism checkers). You may find them. I found one on social media called GPT-2 Output Detector Demo. It's a demo, so it's not a finished product. It's based on GPT2 technology (which is a predecessor to the GPT3 technology that ChatGPT is using as of the writing of this post).

Also, it can be wildly inaccurate. I copied a blog post I wrote into it and it identified it as 92.54% chance of being real. I copied something out of ChatGPT and it identified it as 99.98% chance of being fake. ("Fake," being the term for "written by a bot.") A poem ChatGPT created for a friend, however, was flagged as real.

Beware of using detectors as your way of dealing with this.

They're not reliable. And this approach isn't the long-term solution to helping your students become modern learners.

3. Schools and districts will try to block it, but that won't stop much.

Immediately, IT admins are going to have to decide if they want to block ChatGPT with their internet firewalls. And lots of them will indeed block it. If they do, I hope they don't think that they've solved the "problem" they think they have on their hands.

First of all, blocking ChatGPT on the school's network won't do much. Sure, students won't be able to access it with their school devices on the school network. But did you know that students have cell phones? Phones that operate on a cellular network that the school can't control? They can run to the bathroom, sit in a stall, ask ChatGPT for answers, copy them to a document, come back to class, and transfer the text on that document into their assignment and turn it in. (They can do that at home, too. Or on the bus. Or quietly under the desk in the classroom.)

Whether to block ChatGPT school-wide is still a decision schools and districts have to make.
The bigger decision is: what will teaching and learning look like going forward now that this technology is available?
(Check out the section below called, "Should we block it or try to ban it?")

4. ChatGPT and forthcoming chatbots like it have their limitations.

When you load ChatGPT for the first time, it even tells you what some of its limitations are. Here are a few that it states -- and some others to be aware of for schools/classrooms:

It may occasionally generate incorrect information. As of publication of this post, it's still in "free research preview." That means it's an imperfect product that they're trying to improve.

It may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content. Any artificial intelligence is as good as the dataset it's drawing from -- and how it uses it. It has to make judgment calls just like humans do. Bias exists in judgments. It's still learning how to work with and eliminate its bias.

It has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021. Think of its dataset in a sealed box. It isn't drawing from current events. It can't pull anything from social media. It can't even search the active internet.

It won't make ethical decisions for you. I've asked it a few things where it has to make decisions based on morals, ethics and personal values. It has declined, explaining that that's beyond the scope of what it's trained to do.

I've heard that it struggles to do math sometimes. I admit this is a really, really subjective thing to include with very little to back it up. I keep seeing posts on social media about this. Take this for what it's worth to you.

5. School/class uses of ChatGPT, chatbots, and AI aren't all bad.

Lots of teachers are making judgment calls about the use of this new technology, and many are concerned about its immediate impacts. Here's the truth: it'll make lots of teachers reconsider some types of assignments they'll assign going forward. Hey, they don't want to know how a bot will respond to their prompts, questions, and assignments. They want to use it to gauge learning in a human being. It makes sense.

But let's put it this way. There are some really, really mindless, terrible writing prompts out there ... and math worksheets ... and project assignments. If we're looking long-term, this technology will eventually start to push some of those terrible assignments out and force us to come up with something new. It'll probably be painful, and many of us will probably hate parts of the process. But in the end, we will evolve to something better.j

Also -- just like we did with the calculator, Wikipedia and Google searches -- students and teachers will find productive, meaningful ways to use this new technology for teaching and learning. (More on that below.)

6. Students will have to learn how to navigate life with AI.

Big picture, this is a shift students will deal with for the rest of their lives. Artificial intelligence will continue to get better and better. This version of ChatGPT is the weakest, most rudimentary artificial intelligence of its kind our students will ever use. My friend Holly Clark called it the "Commodore 64 of AI" -- a technology that was revolutionary at the time but is now seen as antiquated and obsolete.

Students will have to wrestle with questions of humanity -- what sets us apart as humans? When should AI be used, and when shouldn't it be?

They'll wrestle with questions of obsolescence -- what can I do that AI can't do? How can I do my best to be sure my work, my passions, my place in this world isn't replaced by artificial intelligence?

They'll wrestle with ethical questions -- how can AI use be fair, equitable, unbiased, good? What happens if it gets in the hands of bad actors? How can I make sure I'm using it in an ethical way?

How do I teach class tomorrow knowing this exists?

Now we know there's an AI product that students can use to do their assignments. And we can't block it. And maybe we feel powerless.

What do we do tomorrow? How do we write lesson plans knowing that this exists -- so that students continue learning right now and don't just turn in answers from a bot?

Consider this your "break glass in case of emergency" section.

1. There's no shame in using paper and pencil -- for now.

I don't think this is the right answer long-term. But in this section of this article with the green background, we're talking about how to weather the storm TODAY until we understand what to do next.

If we close up the computers and ask students to write something on paper, we know it's being generated by their own brains. If you have a crucial essay that needs to be written -- and you're not ready to re-imagine the education system and innovate teaching today -- this can help you survive tomorrow.

But please ... please, please, please ... please do not plan for the long-term like this. This AI technology isn't going away, and its effects will be sprawling and widespread.

2. Make use of collaborative learning and discussions.

When Google Translate started growing, it made people ask questions like we are with ChatGPT. Do I need to learn a language? Then, we learned, if we want to have a true conversation with another human and build relationships, we can't do that effectively by typing everything into Translate. (Even though 90 Day Fiance tried to prove otherwise.)

When students discuss, they do so from their own working and long-term memory. Sure, they can look up quick answers, but to carry on a conversation, most of the work comes from their own thinking. After a discussion, students can recap the discussion and share their reflections about it ... and that's much harder to do with a bot.

Collaborative learning can have these kinds of benefits, too. When students work together, even if they're pulling information from Google or Wikipedia or ChatGPT, they're still talking about what they got, if it fits, how to organize it, how to communicate it effectively, etc.

3. Have students make creative demonstrations of learning.

There's so much benefit from classroom creativity that goes beyond trying to beat an AI chatbot. Creativity in learning can help students with motivation. It can help them make use of their own unique talents and skills. It can help them feel seen and heard and noticed.

When students take what they've learned -- or information they've found from other sources -- they're engaging in elaboration. And that's a good thing.

"Elaboration in learning involves meaning-enhancing additions, constructions, or generations that improve one's memory for what is being learned." ( via ScienceDirect)

Take what you've learned (or gathered). Organize it. Make something with it. And while you do that, you're better understanding what you have.

4. Use retrieval practice, brain dumps, and other memory strategies.

Retrieval practice is the idea of strengthening your long-term memory by recalling everything you can about a specific topic. It seems too easy and too good to be true, but it's been backed by cognitive science for decades. This is a study strategy that helps students strengthen what they've already learned and reflect on what they are learning.

Students can do a "brain dump," where they recall (on paper, verbally, in a document, etc.) everything they know about topics like:

What do you remember from class yesterday?

What do you remember about (this topic) we studied a week ago?

What do you remember about (this topic) we studied last semester?

What do you know about (this topic) we haven't studied yet?

What do you know about (this person)?

What do you know about (this very broad topic)?

What do you know about (this narrow subtopic)?

Brain science (much of which can be found at RetrievalPractice.org) tells us at that these brain dumps build long-term memory the best when they are ungraded. They're a study skill, not a formative assessment.

These memory strategies focus on what students have already learned, and they're pulled from student memory -- not from an AI bot.

If teachers aren't ready to embrace AI, how can they teach without students using AI to cheat? It is important for teachers to be aware of the potential for students to use AI to cheat and to take steps to prevent it. One way to do this is to use methods of assessment that cannot be easily cheated, such as open-ended questions or projects that require original thought and creativity. Teachers can also use tools such as plagiarism detection software to check for copied content in student work. In addition to preventing cheating, it is also important for teachers to educate their students about the appropriate and ethical use of AI. This can include discussing the potential risks and consequences of using AI to cheat, as well as the importance of honesty and integrity in academic work. Ultimately, it is important for teachers to stay up to date with the latest technologies, including AI, and to be proactive in addressing any potential issues that may arise in the classroom. This may require teachers to seek professional development opportunities or to collaborate with others who are more familiar with AI.
Source: ChatGPT via chat.openai.com (2022)

Can I use this as a tool for teaching and learning?

The answer here, I believe is: ABSOLUTELY. The longer that AI and tools like ChatGPT are around, the more that teachers will try new teaching and learning strategies with it.

The more that teachers try new things and share them widely, the more that the educator community will move forward with new ideas. In short: we will figure this out together, even though it will take some time.

But ... what will it look like?

Here are some ideas, brainstormed by me (a human), by others (with citations provided) and by the bot (because, why not ask it too?).

ChatGPT doesn't just write your students' essays for you.

20 ways ChatGPT can help you teach/learn

🧵 /startthread

1. Ask ChatGPT to write your lesson plans. (Or at least to get some new ideas.)
- Matt Miller (@jmattmiller) December 19, 2022

1. Use it as a more complex, nuanced source of information than Google.

During conversations with students and in-class discussions, we can ask ChatGPT (and other tools like it) to provide us the information we need to drive a conversation forward. The bot's response isn't the first and last word in the conversation. Rather, it just provides details that we can use to discuss a topic.

2. Use it to provide students access to lots of good examples.

Think about how musicians and artists develop their style. They copy their mentors. They take their favorite influences and emulate them. Artists take a canvas to an art gallery or the park, and they paint what they see.

I keep remembering this quote from fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, which I learned about through Austin Kleon's book, Steal Like an Artist:

"Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself." -- Yohji Yamamoto

This is also the benefit of being well-read. When students see enough good examples, they start to know what to expect of good writing. Good reasoning. Good logic. They see the hallmarks of it and they can emulate it ... much like a writer or painter emulates the greats.

Artificial intelligence can give students unlimited good examples. (Note that I didn't say "great" examples, but "good.") Ask it for an essay about a certain topic. Then ask it again and it'll give you something different. Then ask it again. Then ask for a slightly different version, specifying something you'd like to see.

When it's time for the student to create something of their own, much like an artist or musician studying the greats, the student will draw from the examples they've seen.

3. Use it to remix student work.

Students create something for class: a story, an essay, a poem, a recap of something they've learned. Then, they can ask ChatGPT (or a similar tool) to remix it for them.

My favorite example to date of this comes from Donnie Piercey, a fifth grade teacher and the 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the Year. He took a student story and asked ChatGPT to remix it as a nursery rhyme, a soap opera, a sea shanty, and a children's book -- with suggested illustrations! Listen as he tells the story in the video below.

When students see how their work has been remixed, it can open them up to new opportunities.

4. Ask it for definitions (on a variety of levels).

If you need a concept explained or defined, ChatGPT (or a similar tool) can provide that explanation -- and do it in as detailed or simple a manner as you'd like.

On episode 99 of the Partial Credit Podcast, Jesse Lubinsky shared that he asked for a definition of "faith" in terms a child would understand. That helped me realize that it can give definitions, descriptions, and explanations -- we expected that -- or it can level them up or down in complexity however we ask.

5. Ask it for feedback for student work.

We know that one key aspect to effective feedback is that it's timely. With traditional paper-based work, students turn it in and must wait for teachers to grade it -- and return it! -- before they can see feedback. Lots of edtech tools are letting us get feedback to students more quickly -- whether automated or through direct communication with a teacher or classmate.

ChatGPT (or a similar tool) can be another source of feedback. When students finish a written work, they can copy/paste their work into ChatGPT and ask how they can improve their writing. For example, I copied one of my blog posts into ChatGPT and simply asked how I could improve it. It gave me a list of five suggestions, including transitional phrases, adding more examples, and breaking it up into shorter paragraphs. (Better start a new paragraph now ...)

Of course, it's up to the student -- and based on what the student has learned about writing -- to decide whether to implement the advice and how.

6. Ask it to do some teacher tasks for you.

Ask ChatGPT (or a similar tool) to write some lesson plans for you. Or some questions for a quiz. Ask it for some jokes about your content so you can slip those into class. Of course, you don't have to use everything that it provides you verbatim. But it might give you a starting point you can modify -- or if you already have something, it can give you ideas to improve.

7. Add it to the "think pair share" thinking routine.

Augmenting the think-pair-share with ChatGPT could be one of the biggest tech-enabled leaps in pedagogy:
* Think
* Pair
* ChatGPT
* Pair
* Share
- Sarah Dillard (@dillardsarah) December 5, 2022

I love this line of thinking from Sarah Dillard (Twitter: @dillardsarah), and if you click on it and look at the whole thread, she explains it more. Students think about a prompt, then discuss it with a classmate. Then they do any searches they want on ChatGPT. They pair back up to discuss what they've found. Then they share with the class.

Using ChatGPT and AI doesn't have to be THE way we teach certain things, but it can add important steps to existing frameworks.

8. Grade the bot.

Jen Giffen (Twitter: @virtualgiff) talked with her high school-aged students about the use of AI and tools like ChatGPT. (We talked on the phone. You'll see that the phone call sparked lots of ideas!) After that conversation, she suggested this idea:

Give a writing prompt to ChatGPT (or a similar tool). It could be a different writing prompt than you'll give your students. Read the essay that the bot creates for you.

Then, give the students the rubric you'll use to grade them and ask them to grade the response from the artificial intelligence.

This helps students to be reflective about the grading process -- and about their own writing process. When students get grades on their own work, it's easy to take it personally -- or to dismiss it because it makes them feel like they've messed up a lot. But when they critique the work of a bot that doesn't have feelings, it eliminates a lot of those emotions.

9. Debate the bot.

This came from that conversation with Jen, too, and she said she's seen this one shared on social media a lot.

Let students (as individuals, in pairs or small groups, or even as a whole-group activity) debate ChatGPT (or a similar tool).

Students take one side of a debate. The AI takes the other. Students plug their points in and ask the bot to rebut.

It gives them low-stakes practice -- and as much practice as they want -- to hone their debate skills. Plus, they may see talking points for their own stance (or that their opponent may use) so they can strengthen their argument.

10. Ask the bot for advice.

One more takeaway from this conversation with Jen! (Although several of the ideas below were sparked during that conversation ... so, you know, credit where credit is due.)

Jen asked ChatGPT very generally, "Give me some advice." It gave her some general (yet very good) ideas on managing stress and relationships and mental wellbeing.

A bot can't be a replacement for counseling or medical help. But we do take advice from friends, family ... even strangers sometimes. If students are struggling with just about anything, they can get advice from this artificial intelligence -- an AI that's working with much of the entirety of the internet as its dataset.

11. Use it to summarize texts.

If a text that your students are reading is in the dataset of ChatGPT (or a similar tool), they could always try to ask it for a summary of the whole thing -- or of certain chapters, sections, acts, scenes, etc. This is what we used SparkNotes and Cliff's Notes for years ago. Of course, SparkNotes and Cliff's Notes were controversial in the past -- "if they read those, they'll never read the text!" -- but eventually we found ways that they could support learning, too.

Seeing a summary of a text that you've just read can help you process what you've read. It's similar in nature to a book club. You hear what other people think and observe about the text and it helps inform your view of it.

This could also be a helpful strategy for reviewing before a quiz or a test.

12. Use it for insight into big, difficult-to-solve problems.

Before you read this one, just remember ... I taught high school Spanish for 10+ years. I'm not a math or science teacher, and I kind of struggled with those during school. That said ...

If you -- or your students -- come up with a math or science problem bigger than you know how to solve (or don't want to take the time to solve), ask ChatGPT (or a similar tool).

If it can solve it, it'll show you an answer. But, more importantly, you'll gain some insight into the process of solving it. And even if it can't solve it, it'll tell you why.

You could also ask it bigger societal questions to see what it would say. I asked it how to solve world hunger, and here's what I got:

Eliminating world hunger is a complex and multifaceted challenge that requires the efforts of governments, international organizations, and individuals around the world. Some strategies that have been proposed to address this issue include:

Increasing agricultural productivity: This can be done through the use of advanced technologies such as precision farming and genetically modified crops, as well as by improving infrastructure and access to education and training for farmers.

Reducing food waste: Up to one-third of all food produced in the world is lost or wasted, which represents a significant opportunity to increase food availability. Reducing food waste can be achieved through better storage and transportation systems, as well as by increasing awareness about the issue.

Improving distribution systems: In many cases, food is available, but it is not distributed effectively to those who need it most. Improving distribution systems, including supply chains and transportation networks, can help get food to the people who need it.

Promoting economic development: Economic growth can lead to increased food production and greater access to food, as well as the resources and infrastructure needed to address food insecurity.

Providing emergency food aid: In times of crisis, such as during natural disasters or armed conflict, providing emergency food aid can help prevent starvation and malnutrition.

Ultimately, addressing world hunger will require a combination of these and other approaches, as well as strong political will and sustained commitment from governments and other organizations.
Source: ChatGPT via chat.openai.com (2022)

14. Anticipate the response you'd expect from AI.

If your students have been studying a topic, this could be a great retrieval / brain dump activity -- and a way of ranking the importance of all the things they've learned about the topic.

Tell them that you're going to ask ChatGPT (or a similar tool) to summarize what they've been studying. Ask them what they think the bot will say. It'll prompt them to recall knowledge from their memory (which strengthens long-term memory). Plus, when they rank them in importance (because the bot won't list everything it knows), they'll have to give a justification.

All of this leads to deeper understanding of the material -- and strengthened long-term memory.

15. Take several responses and make a better product.

ChatGPT often has a button at the bottom of a response that says "regenerate response." That's because each time you ask it a question, it generates something original, doing the work from scratch every time.

If you were asked to pick a movie as your favorite, describe it, and tell why you like it in 60 seconds, your response each time would be a little different. (For me, the movie would probably be different every time!) It's an original, unique work each time. ChatGPT works kind of like that every time.

Ask it to answer a question or write something for you. Then ask it again ... and again ... and again. Get five (or more!) versions of the same prompt.

Have students (individually, in pairs/small groups, or even ask a class) take the best parts from those versions and turn it into a better final product.

This can be a scaffolding strategy for students who struggle to write essays or papers. It introduces them to some of the strategy of crafting a written work without all of the taxing effort of doing the whole thing.

16. Create personalized learning experiences.
Response from ChatGPT to "How can AI be used to help teach in the classroom?" AI can be used to create personalized learning experiences for students by adapting the content and pace of instruction to each student's needs and abilities. This can be achieved through the use of adaptive learning software, which adjusts the material based on the student's performance.
Source: ChatGPT via chat.openai.com (2022)

17. Provide tutoring or coaching.
Response from ChatGPT to "How can AI be used to help teach in the classroom?" AI can be used to provide one-on-one tutoring or coaching to students, either in person or remotely. This can be particularly useful for students who may not have access to human tutors, or for subjects that are difficult to teach in a traditional classroom setting.
Source: ChatGPT via chat.openai.com (2022)

18. Generate prompts and questions to facilitate discussions.
Response from ChatGPT to "How can you (ChatGPT) be used to help teach in the classroom?" I can be used to facilitate discussions among students by posing questions and prompts that encourage critical thinking and encourage students to engage with the material in a deeper way.
Source: ChatGPT via chat.openai.com (2022)

19. Provide information and answer questions.
Response from ChatGPT to "How can you (ChatGPT) be used to help teach in the classroom?" I can be used to provide students with information on a wide range of topics, and to answer their questions on those topics. This can be particularly useful for subjects that may be difficult to understand or that require a lot of background knowledge.
Source: ChatGPT via chat.openai.com (2022)

20. Supplement in-person instruction.
Response from ChatGPT to "How can you (ChatGPT) be used to help teach in the classroom?" I can be used to supplement in-person instruction by providing additional resources and materials for students to explore on their own, or by offering additional support and assistance outside of the classroom.
Source: ChatGPT via chat.openai.com (2022)

Should we block it or try to ban it?

If we block ChatGPT (or tools like it) and think we're solving a problem, we're deluding ourselves.

There are two decisions that need to be addressed since ChatGPT was released.

A big, systemic decision that needs to be made is: What will teaching and learning look like with ChatGPT and AI in existence?

We've started unpacking that above (and in conversations all over the globe).

But there's a more pressing question, and it's one that requires a bit of nuance ...

Do we block it at school?

Immediately, schools and districts must decide whether to block access to it on school networks and devices.

That decision, however, won't solve "the problem." (I use quotes because I'm not convinced that the proliferation of AI is a problem. It really does disrupt how we have done -- and are doing -- school, though.)

Students still will have access to it. It's like social media. It can be blocked at school. But students can access it (as I mentioned above) on their phones under a desk, in the restroom, on a bus, at home ... anywhere. They'll get access.

But someone has to decide. Should it be blocked at school?

What educators in my social media circles are saying ...
The resounding answer has been, "No, don't block it."
Their rationale: This is the future. It's not going anywhere. Students must have access to it. It'll prepare them for the future. Why would we want to keep students from accessing something so powerful?

There's something to know about these social media circles, though. Lots of people in them aren't in the classroom and don't have a good perspective on what full-time teachers go through.
(Full disclosure: I don't teach full time anymore either. I'm in my wife's and kids' schools a lot, but I don't teach full time.)
The ones in these social media circles that are in the classroom? They're dreamers (like me). They've seen the ways the system is broken. They're ready for change.

In the end -- if we're playing the long game (and I think we are), I side with them.

Generally.

What regular teachers in regular classrooms are saying ...
If you walk into any given classroom in schools across the United States (and some parts of the world)? The resounding answer has been, "Please block it. Right now!"
These are the teachers who write lesson plans. Every single day.

They grade student work. Every single day.

They teach and supervise and facilitate class. Every single day.

They never have enough time to do what they need. Their checklist is never complete.

There's a level of survival in these classrooms.

Reinventing their teaching methods and assignments at the drop of a hat because a new AI bot came out?

They just don't have time for that. (And they don't have the capacity in their already fractured personal wellness to do that.)

I understand.

I think, deep down inside, these teachers know the potential of AI and tools like ChatGPT. They know that it's going to change how teaching and learning looks.

They just need to survive the day. The week.

They need to survive until break.

They're on the front lines, dealing with all sorts of difficult situations and a lack of resources and a lack of respect for the classroom and the teaching profession.

They also just did this. Do you remember? (If you don't, you probably haven't taught in a classroom for a few years.)

Teachers are just starting to feel a sense of normality after pandemic-induced remote teaching. They had to reinvent the way they teach -- immediately! -- to a remote format, one that most weren't prepared for, technologically or pedagogically or logistically.

As teacher wellness expert Mandy Froehlich (Twitter: @froehlichm) said, they're trying to get out of emergency mode. And when you finally get out of emergency mode, there's a let-down ... an emotional, sometimes physical, response to the trauma you've dealt with.

So to those that look down their noses at teachers who are begging for this to be blocked, let's just remember the recent past. And let's also remember that they likely understand the impact of this.

They just want to survive the week. Survive until break.

Survive until we get a spare moment to think about this. Learn about it. Brainstorm some ways to change our assignments so that they can't

A proposal for schools/districts that's a middle ground

(Hear my justification for this proposal in the video) Let's block it until the end of the school year.
Let's not make a long-term decision to block ChatGPT (and tools like it) forever.

Let's also not make a long-term decision to leave it open forever.

(I'm not totally confident that this is the right answer. But I haven't heard anyone argue for the middle ground yet, so I want to add this voice.)

Let's agree to block it on student devices and networks (and allow it on teachers devices/networks if possible) just until the end of the school year.

To look at their assignments and consider how they'd like to change them in light of this new technology.

To look at how they teach and how this might be incorporated in it.

To look at how technology like this might augment classroom discussions

Here's why ...

Teachers need some time to regroup ...

... and on and on.

We need some space. Some time. A little room to ponder, to sit with all of this. To talk to other educators about what they think. To talk to students and to parents.

Let's just give teachers a little space.

However, let's also make a few things clear.

1. This isn't the long-term answer. This is a stopgap to help struggling teachers to survive this sudden change.

2. Students still will have access to this. Just because we block this on student networks and devices doesn't mean they won't plug your writing prompts and questions into this technology. This just buys you a little time to finish the year with your traditional assignment types to come up with something new.

A faculty-wide discussion and brainstorming session about best ways to teach and learn is in order at the end of the year. Everyone shares their best ideas and prepares for their implementation. (And let's pay the teachers for this extra meeting, OK?)
1. Will this technology be blocked on school networks and devices? 2. How will we evolve our teaching practice now that these technologies exist?
Then, at the beginning of next school year, let's open the ChatGPT floodgates.

Even if this isn't the solution you (or your school/district) comes to, there are two decisions that need to be made:

Blocking ChatGPT district-wide is one decision.

Deciding how teaching/learning happen while it exists is another. (to me)

If a district thinks blocking it will solve the problem, they're deluding themselves.

Blocking it can be one part of a solution, I believe. https://t.co/CvHCT2RqSQ
- Matt Miller (@jmattmiller) December 14, 2022

What other resources can help me learn about this?

Below is a list (albeit incomplete!) of resources I've found in the weeks after ChatGPT came into existence. I'll share links along with why I like them as resources. Please add other resources -- even your own! -- in the comments below!

ChatGPT in Classrooms: What to Know (U.S. News and World Report) -- Students, teachers and others in education weigh in on this new AI tool and the implications it has in the classroom.

What can English teachers do about ChatGPT (Learning in Room 213) -- This post explores what ChatGPT is, the problems with blocking it, and suggestions: entice personal engagement, avoid formulaic assignments, build critical thinking, etc.

No, Artificial Intelligence Won't Destroy High School English (or Any Other Subject) (John Spencer, Spencer Author) -- I've waited to read this because I wanted to create my own piece of content without copying anyone, but I've been excited to see John's thoughts on it. Hang on a second, let me read it ... Yep, it's as fantastic as I expected. Some of John's points include: "Almost any task can be automated, but what's the joy in that?"; "If we outsources every task, we might short-circuit the learning"; and "AI can't replace your voice." This is really, really good.

Human Skills in a World of Artificial Intelligence (John Spencer, Spencer Author) -- In this post (which dovetails wonderfully with the one above), John outlines the problems with a couple approaches to AI and advocates for another one: "the human approach."

The conversation about how much we care (Twitter thread by Evan Weinberg @emwdx) -- This thread doesn't seem to have gotten much attention, but I really like where Evan's going with it. He introduces it with: "As we see start to see how easy it is for a tool like #ChatGPT to generate text that sounds convincingly like us, it is starting the conversation about how much we care. We care a lot more than we might initially admit."

Ideas for using ChatGPT in the Classroom (IB English Guys) -- They opened up this collaborative Google Doc to share ideas. There are 10+ ideas with rationale and comments from educators.

AI Homework (Stratechery) -- This is an interesting, thoughtful, nuanced look at the intersection of homework and artificial intelligence. He talks about the struggles that ChatGPT has with math, and he even runs a virtual machine (like a Linux terminal) inside ChatGPT.

Yes, Teachers, You Should Be Panicking About AI (The Broken Copier) -- This post provides six reasons why we should be concerned about ChatGPT and AI (in light of the condition of education in many classrooms right now), helping us make sense of how we move forward.

The College Essay is Dead (The Atlantic) -- This was one of the first posts I saw (that was circulated widely) about the impact of ChatGPT in education. It's a paid article on The Atlantic. I subscribed so I could read it so that I could tell you ... it's talking points and not much else. If you'd like to read commentary about it and you're a subscribers to The Atlantic, go for it. I wouldn't pay for it ... especially since I'm focused on what we can actually do with this technology.

No, ChatGPT is Not the End of High School English. But Here's the Useful Tool It Offers Teachers (Forbes) -- Here's the best point in this whole article (so you don't have to read it): ChatGPT is an excellent prompt tester. Think you've come up with a good writing prompt? Feed it to the chatbot. If it can come up with an essay that you would consider a good piece of work, then that prompt should be refined, reworked, or simply scrapped.

Learning More about Chat GPT in Education (Jennifer Casa-Todd) -- Jen has written books about social media, digital literacy, and technology's impact on children's lives. She shares some of the best things she's found about the topic.

Education is about to radically change: AI for the masses (Nate McClennen and Rachelle Dené Poth for Getting Smart) -- AI already does and will continue to impact education - along with every other sector. Innovative education leaders have an opportunity to build the foundation for the most personalized learning system we have ever seen.

Let's Chat: OpenAI and ChatGPT (THRIVEinEDU podcast by Rachelle Dené Poth) -- Have you tried OpenAI yet? What has your experience been? Rachelle shares some background info, insights, questions and more in this episode. She also shares at her blog: www.Rdene915.com.

Chatbots in Education: Middle School and High School (Heather Olvey and Terri Files) -- These teachers pulled together slide decks with ideas for implementing chatbots in the classroom.
Have a resource to add -- yours or from someone else? Share it in the comments below!

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ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education

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Now, we're wondering ... Calculators.Search engines.Google Translate.Wikipedia.PhotoMath.#ChatGPT. They disrupt traditional teaching. We adapt. Education evolves forward. Blocking them isn't the answer. Making education more relevant is.- Matt Miller (@jmattmiller) December 14, 2022 Jump straight to a section (click a button below): ⭐️ Add thoughts, ideas, resources in the comments at the bottom!

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Google vs. ChatGPT: What happened when I swapped services for a day

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Google vs. ChatGPT: What happened when I swapped services for a day