#2 Ask Students to Use AI for Written Assignments
Transparency as key while students and educators familiarize themselves with new tools.
Generative AI has been heralded as doom for any written assigments at schools and universities and consequently the end of an essential pillar in humanistic undergrad education. Both main claims are debatable — the role of written assignments for education in general and generative AI’s impact on them. However, almost a year after this conversation started, we can agree that conversational AI tools based on LLMs (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard) can create text that will pass a teacher’s requirements for a written assignment while remaining undetected as the product of AI.
When AI is used to create anything, questions of authorship and plagiarism pop up quickly. Transparency is key here. We should share how and when we used which tools to help us with the creation of something.
A healthy dose of scepticism is also helpful. Keeping the general disclaimers by OpenAI and Google in their respective tools in mind:
“ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.”
“Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information …”
But prohibiting students from using AI tools is unrealistic. And since they’re going to use them anyway (many of them already are), we’d better familiarize ourselves with their capabilities and limitations, with the best practices of how to use them and what to avoid. And we should keep in mind that these are developing and changing constantly together with the tools themselves. That should be a goal for teachers and students alike.
Prohibiting students from using AI tools is unrealistic.
Educators around the globe are experimenting with adapted assignments that allow their students to familiarize themselves with AI by allowing them to use it in certain ways help them create their texts.
Here are a few ideas about how to let students use generative AI for written assignments and ways to help to stay more transparent about the use of AI in the writing process:
Let AI create a first draft of an assignment or of a part of it and then edit it, fact-check it, and so on.
Let AI create an outline for their assignment, with placeholders or with topic sentences to get them started.
Write a first draft yourself but then use AI to edit, e.g. by asking it to improve specific sentences or find more suitable terms or better examples or explanations.
Ask AI for multiple ways to phrase something, e.g. how to explain a term, and then pick, combine, and edit to create an even better final version. For example, ask for four versions of a intro sentence/paragraph or for a sentence that should link two paragraphs.
Create a paragraph with one tool and then let it being critiqued, graded, or improved by another tool (e.g. asking ChatGPT to grade a text created by Bard).
Ask two tools to create a text (same/similar prompt) and compare the results. Or even compare multiple results of multiple tools. What are the essential concepts and terms used in all of them and how do these compare what you can find in a textbook or scientific publications?
Use a writing tool that stores the full editing history, like Google docs or etherpad. The editing history might then be shared/submitted together with the end product.
Use marking (bold or italicized font, or highlighting with different colors) to clarify what was created entirely by you, what was paraphrased from an AI output, and what was copied directly from an AI tool.
🔨Tools & Resources
Recent finds of education-related AI tools and resources about them.
Life skills course “AI for Education” on Khan Academy
References
AI use Statement: No AI was used in drafting or editing of this post.