Help! We can't allow our students to use AI!!!!

Submitted by Tamra S. Connor

But they are using it anyway!

`If your first reaction to the words "artificial intellegence" or "generative AI" is to ask what is that?  You are living in the stone age of digital technology.  It's almost impossible to talk about business without also bringing AI into the future.  

I follow a Facebook page chatGPT for Teachers where the discussions are active, respectful, and helpful.  One of top posts was authored by an admin for the page, Greg Alexander, where he posts several questions.  

• Is using AI bad?
• isn't it cheating?
• Do AI detectors even work?
• Why is it okay for teachers to use ChatGPT, but not students?

All of these questions are great and the comments on the page.  One particular comment stands out.  Orren Prunckun wrote, "Because teachers are obsessed with how 'it' should be and not how 'it' actually is.  Plus add a sprinkle of 'back in my day.'"  Are you ignoring AI because of how it should be?  Or are you immersing yourself into learning this new tool?

Did you know that over 4,000 AI tools were developed last week? Are you aware that today's employers are expecting students to be able to ethically use AI for their jobs?  Do you understand that a large-language model (generative AI) pulls data from the entire world wide web, potentially introducing incorrect or misinformation into the results?  Are you aware that the bias of the internet is perpetuated in responses created by generative AI?  

One student teacher on the Facebook thread talked about their dilemma of being required to learn from their supervising teacher how to teach.  This student states that they are theoretically required to model the supervising teacher's methods, but that they are banned from using AI by the university.  What is a student to do?  Earn a poor grade as a student teacher or potentially face being expelled for using banned technology because that is what their supervising teacher expects?

The tool everyone probably knows about is chatGPT.  You can sign up for a free account at OpenAI.  DALL-E 2 is another AI system to create images from a description.  These are two tools out of thousands.  Check them out and comment below with your thoughts.

There are so many questions we need to ask ourselves, as teachers.  If you haven't started using any of the AI tools, it is time to embrace them and learn.  After all, we are teachers who want our students to be life-long learners.  We must be as well.