Is Diffit AI a Cheat Code for Teachers?

This week we were tasked to try out some kind of AI tool and see if it could be useful for us as teachers. I honestly didn’t expect any of them to be useful past maybe helping out with information. Instead, I’m shocked to find out that Diffit seems like almost a cheat code. I had thought it would just use AI in some way to find resources you can use to teach about whatever topic you enter. I decided to try the War of 1812, to see what it would show me. I was shocked to find out how crazy this was.

This website uses AI to research a top for you, and then not only summarize it in short notes scaled to your desired grade level, but it also generates multiple choice and short answer quizzes, as well as more open ended question suggestions to ask you class to test understanding. It lists the sources it uses to gain this information, and lists them for you to check. This on its own, would be interesting enough. As long as you check your sources to make sure it all checks out, you have auto generated notes to base your class on. But this website takes it further. You can export this information into pre-made slides, quizzes, notes, and worksheets.

This feature is insane, really. Even if the slides aren’t exactly how you want them, or the quizzes ask exactly what you want them to, you can edit these easily and use them. Its gives you a pre-formatted baseline for whatever topic you want to teach. It’s not hard to see how teacher can use this to save loads of time in their lesson planning and teaching. Even students can use it to help themselves get easily digestible notes to study off of, and it doesn’t generate essays like some other AI tools. It wouldn’t add anything that new, it just cuts out the time you would take as a teacher or student to do research yourself. However, I do believe there are problems with this. How different is this than auto-generating an essay from ChatGPT, changing it around a bit to better fit your topic, and handing it in?

The biggest difference is the reason for AI’s use. Using AI to write an essay is pretending to learn. Then, wouldn’t Diffit make teachers being pretending to teach? Couldn’t it be argued that the teacher isn’t teaching something that they know? Would it be fair to the students, to skip your part of the work, but they cannot skip their part?

So maybe a teacher doesn’t use the pre-made quizzes and worksheets for students, but why not use the auto-generated resources it found with the notes they gave you as a summary? That way you aren’t actually skipping the time planning a lesson, its just helping you find some information to use in your lesson. Well then, I ask what the issue is for students doing the same?

I believe this really wouldn’t be fair to the students. We ask students not to use AI, we punish them if they do so for any purpose at an stage in an essay. The root of this, is that its not doing research and presenting a finding, its letting AI do the research, and you presenting it as your own. The reason we can’t trust AI to do the research isn’t just we can’t always trust it to be right, its that you don’t learn as much as you do when you actually read five articles to find information, or watch 3 videos to understand how something works. Even when looks for a specific answer and using AI to try and find it, you miss out on a large amount of learning you do from just trying to find the one answer.

Personally, I think AI has no place in the classroom when it comes to learning, or teaching. I believe that you don’t learn nearly as much from AI than you do by actually doing your own research. By extent, I believe that you would be teaching much less with AI than you would by making your own plans from scratch. When you make the plan you decide what is most important for students to learn. When you research a topic, you decide what is the important information to your argument or against it. By using AI in the classroom, you lose the amount of learning you get out of the classroom.