The teachers Will spoke to had already began applying a critical lens to technologies similar to ChatGPT. Emily Donahoe, a writing tutor and academic developer on the University of Mississippi, said she thinks that ChatGPT could help teachers shift away from an excessive concentrate on final results. Getting a category to have interaction with AI and think critically about what it generates could make teaching feel more human, she says, “slightly than asking students to jot down and perform like robots.”

And since the AI model has been trained with North American data and reflects North American biases, teachers are finding that it’s an excellent technique to start a conversation about bias. 

David Smith, a professor of bioscience education at Sheffield Hallam University within the UK, allows his undergraduate students to make use of ChatGPT of their written assignments, but he’ll assess the prompt in addition to—and even slightly than—the essay itself. “Knowing the words to make use of in a prompt after which understanding the output that comes back is vital,” he says. “We want to show the right way to try this.” 

Considered one of the largest flaws of AI language models is that they make stuff up and confidently present falsehoods as facts. This makes them unsuitable for tasks where accuracy is amazingly essential, similar to scientific research and health care. But Helen Crompton, an associate professor of instructional technology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has found the AI’s model’s “hallucinations” a useful teaching tool too. 

“The incontrovertible fact that it’s not perfect is great,” Crompton says. It’s a possibility for productive discussions about misinformation and bias. 

These sorts of examples give me hope that education systems and policymakers will realize just how essential it’s to show the following generation critical pondering skills around AI. 

For adults, one promising AI literacy initiative is a free online course called Elements of AI, which is developed by startup MinnaLearn and the University of Helsinki. It was launched in 2018 and is now available in 28 languages. Elements of AI teaches people what AI is and, most significant, what it might probably and may’t do. I’ve tried it myself, and it’s an excellent resource.

My greater concern is whether or not we’ll give you the chance to get adults in control quickly enough. Without AI literacy among the many internet-surfing adult population, an increasing number of persons are sure to fall prey to unrealistic expectations and hype. Meanwhile, AI chatbots might be weaponized as powerful phishing, scamming, and misinformation tools.