Artificial intelligence has now become a normal part of our lives and it is so weird and scary to think that is is. “Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy”. AI can also respond to human language and also models and creates contents that already exist.
ChatGPT is one of the most known AI websites in North America. All you have to do is ask for a prompt, or for an answer to a question and it will give you one in the matter of seconds. Because ChatGPT is AI, you can ask it to give an answer or a prompt for anything and it will give it to you.
ChatGPT can be used to help teachers create lesson plans, the bare bones of a lesson plan or could be a way to find out if there is a better way to teach something that students are just not getting. ChatGPT can come up with many good ideas or prompts that you never thought about. ChatGPT can help with giving students prompts or ideas on what their essay should be about or how to even start the essay. It may encourage creativity because students’ may use the basic ideas that ChatGPT generated and take it to another level because they knew what to do with that idea. ChatGPT can also be a great tool for students when they are struggling with understanding a concept. They can ask ChatGPT to explain it in an easier way and it will usually “dumb it down” so it can be understandable. ChatGPT will not really help assess students’ knowledge or their work.
Some ethical issues with ChatGPT is that it can essentially be used to cheat. Students can plug in questions, ChatGPT will give an answer and the student can just copy that answer onto their own page without doing a single ounce of work. This can become a problem because when there is a test, the student won’t know how he/she got the answer or where the answer came from because they just copied it down from ChatGPT and not do well on their test.
Some practical issues of ChatGPT is that it is never 100% correct. I have personally seen many errors when I have asked math questions, physics questions, or simply when I asked it to write me a biology paper. ChatGPT can also make up sources that don’t even exist. If students use ChatGPT, they have to be careful and watch for errors.
Quillbot is an AI tool that is used primarily to paraphrase work taken from a document to make it sound like your own. This is a helpful video on how to navigate Quillbot.
Quillbot has many categories that you can choose from to make the paraphrased text fit into whatever kind of piece that you are writing. This tool is honestly extremely helpful when used the right way. If you are using it on your own paragraph that you have written and just want to make it sound better, I would recommend putting it into Quillbot. This tool can be used to create more professional sounding emails, help rephrase questions or even help when writing. Students will be able to take their own work and put it into Quillbot to get words that they wouldn’t have thought of using. It can be fun for students to use which will keep them engaged in their writing. Quillbot also has options for grammar checking, AI detecting, plagiarism checking and a summarizer.
There are a few ethical and practical problems with Quillbot. Quillbot doesn’t help students think critically. Before AI, I used a thesaurus to find words that I could replace lame sounding words with. Students may think that they can just copy and paste a paragraph from a website into Quillbot, hit “paraphrase”, and be able to put it in their own work without CITING it. This is a big NO! You’ll still have to cite the work even if it is paraphrased. Most students don’t know this so they are caught for plagiarizing which can have major consequences.
I think that when AI is used correctly, it can be very beneficial. It can help with guiding students in their work by giving them prompts or ideas. It can also be helpful for teachers by creating a schedule for them that helps them with time management when it comes to lesson planning. I do think that there are major consequences to AI like cheating, a lack of critical thinking/creativity or plagiarism. Overall, I am torn between how much I would allow it in my classroom or if I just wouldn’t. I really don’t know the right answer to this. I for sure know that I wouldn’t use Turnitin to check for AI. Turnitin is a resource that detects plagiarism and searches for the sources that the plagiarism comes from. The plagiarism feature of Turnitin is important but the feature where it can detect AI seems extremely sketchy. There have been so many cases where students have been falsely accused of using AI because of Turnitin. I don’t want to put my students through the stress of submitting their work into apps like Turnitin because it can result in errors. I believe that I will be able to tell the difference between my students’ own writing and them just copying and pasting something from AI (ChatGPT). I would also teach students how to properly use the paraphrasing tool in Quillbot to avoid the risk of being caught for plagiarism.
Overall, I understand the risks with using AI and those risks needs to be conveyed to the students but AI can also be helpful when used properly. I do think that AI will be used more and more in the future but for now, it is good when used in moderation and when used as a proper resource. I think that it is important to educate students on the risks of using AI before they use it.