The language surrounding AI can be bewildering. At it’s most basic level, generative AI uses existing data to create “new” content (text, images, graphics, etc). The Aspen Institute has a useful introduction to the technology. A guide to the terminology surrounding AI (so you can tell your LLMs from your neural networks) can be found here. In short, as we use it here, we mean the term in a broad sense, but particularly technology that creates “novel” content based on prompts from users.
You’ve probably heard of, or used, ChatGPT*, and seen AI integrated into Google (Gemini) Microsoft products (Copilot) etc. There are also a wide variety of education-specific AI products that are being aggressively marketed to teachers and students, promising to transform the educational experience – everything from increasing student engagement (e.g. by writing math problems about Taylor Swift or Pokemon) to differentiating instruction (by taking a text and adjusting the reading level to fit a group of students) to writing lesson plans.
Students are also being encouraged to use to to generate images for class projects, to help with brainstorming and research, and as tutors for difficult subjects like math, science, and world languages where adaptive repetition is useful.
Consider this excerpt from an open letter written to Malden Public Schools: “As one Massachusetts school administrator recently said; this moment with AI is remarkably like the moment when we were introduced to asbestos. Yes, it had some remarkably promising characteristics – fireproofing! – and had some real utility in science, research, and industrial applications. But a profit-driven industry bullied us into inserting it everywhere; into our homes and schools and public spaces, before we really understood the risks. This resulted in decades, if not centuries, of illness, injuries, deaths, and the astronomical financial burden of trying to remove the stuff.” Just imagine how many millions of dollars school districts across the country have spent over the past 40 years removing asbestos from public school buildings.
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