Use of Artificial intelligence, or AI, has exploded. The eruption is leaving teachers to question how AI will change what and how students learn.
The U.S. Department of Education released a report entitled “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations" on May 24. According to the press announcement covering the report, the text stresses the importance of creating guidelines for AI in school settings.
This report came eight months after the public release of Chat GPT, a language-based AI model that can write essays.
A professor at SDSU has thoughts on what this will mean for students.
“Once we have the tool, is the stuff that we usually teach the students still that important? So we should think about that. That is what I feel, and also the Chat GPT doesn’t represent whole AI,” said Kaquin Fu.
Fu has used AI in research for the purpose of collecting large data samples, most recently he used a program that filtered through social media posts about COVID-19. The model identified new data points, something that models based on historical archives, like Chat GPT, cannot do.
Another research project, overseen by SDSU’s Amanda Cheeseman PhD., focused on studying river otters by using artificial intelligence to identify trail camera picture of animals. The program has sorted through over three million pictures.
Artificial intelligence’s ability to consume large amouts of data is changing the way AI appears in higher education. However, this does not mean that all educators are ruling out the potential uses of Chat GPT and other language models.
“They also offer an enormous possibility for us to really increase our ability to do tasks more rapidly,” said Cheeseman. “I’ve been using Chat GPT today to help me create some nice publication quality graphs for a paper I am working on. So they perform slightly different tasks, but personally, I am more optimistic than pessimistic about our future with those models.”
The U.S. Office of Educational Technology plans to address the conversation in an online seminar on June 13. More information can be found on their website.