I think we can see that AI is much more than just a passing fad. It is here to stay, and it is going to change the world, in some ways that we probably cannot anticipate yet. I recall reading online a line something like “AI is not going to take your job. A person who understands and uses AI will take jobs from people who do not understand and use AI.” I suspect that there is a lot of truth in that statement.
Ban AI?
When AI first appeared, there were some educators who wanted to completely ban students from using AI, fearing that it would make cheating and plagiarism too easy. While there is probably some truth in that fear, a complete AI ban for students is probably going to be about as successful as Prohibition was in the US.
Calculators and computers changed the educational landscape, and AI is poised to do the same. Rather than fighting the change, we should all learn to surf the volatility and encourage (and model) responsible, wise use of AI.
Perhaps instead of banning student use of AI, we should require students to cite their source and LLM choice in the same way they would cite quotations from a journal article. Do I support students using AI to write the complete term paper for them? No. Is it a valuable research tool that we should encourage students to use wisely and within acceptable limits of academic integrity? Absolutely.
I have used AI as an educator myself, most notably to generate additional practice problems for my students to use for practice. And I have encouraged students to use AI for this purpose as well.
Responsible Use
Like any new tool, AI can be of great benefit if used responsibly. It can create great harm if not used responsibly. A car can be used to drive to work or school. Or it can be used by criminals to assist in armed robbery of a bank. The car itself is not inherently good or evil, nor should it be banned simply because it could potentially be used for nefarious purposes. Instead we encourage people to use motor vehicles responsibly and safely. Similarly, we should encourage students to use AI responsibly and safely.
Historical Comparison
Before we had calculators, there were slide rules. After the basic calculator, we had scientific calculators. Then we had graphing calculators. Each in its own time was at first not welcomed, and then eventually allowed and even embraced by educators for student use. Now the computerized SAT allows students to use the Desmos graphing calculator. While the basic drudgery of math has been outsourced to calculators and computation tools, creative problem solving and knowing exactly what prompts to feed into the computational tool is still up to the student to figure out. And I think the same will eventually be true for AI as well. Mundane tasks can be left to the machine, while more creative high-level thinking will still be the responsibility of the human user.
Limitations
And AI still is not at the level yet where we can completely trust its results. I know a real estate professional who used AI to generate some written material, and the AI cited “US Code xyz Section abc.” There actually is no US Code xyz Section abc – the AI hallucinated in generating this result. I once asked ChatGPT to provide five practice problems involving systems of equations to help my student study math for the SAT. Two of those five problems, as written by the AI, had no possible solution – the AI generated bad problems. So we still definitely need humans in the loop.
What do you think? Please leave a comment below. Thanks for reading.