Many ai tools available for education are often slightly modified versions of ChatGPT. These tend to have the same chatbot interface, as well as many of the common strengths and weaknesses.
However, I'm increasingly finding that the ai tools I'm most interested in seem to have more immediate educational potential and are nothing like ChatGPT. Instead, they use ai in a specific way to perform a specific task.
These are some of the tools that I find most useful today or most intriguing. While not all of these tools are ready for prime time in the classroom, they all fill an unusual niche that I haven't been able to duplicate with ChatGPT or other more well-known ai chatbots.
1. STORM
Elizabeth Radday, Ed.D. Director of Research and Innovation at EdAdvance in Connecticut, spoke to me a few weeks ago about STORM, a generative ai tool developed by Stanford University. I haven't stopped playing with it since then.
Aimed at academia, the tool quickly creates a high-level academic chapter on any research topic, complete with real quotes. I've written about topics that I write about or that interest me, such as flipped learning, the multiverse, and the history of Christmas trees. In each case, within a couple of minutes, he provided a detailed description of the topic that felt like my own personalized, hyper-specific Wikipedia page. This serves as a good springboard for research and could be helpful to educators in the process of earning their own advanced degrees. It could also provide help to more advanced students conducting research.
Radday notes that STORM basically accomplishes in a few minutes what took him months to accomplish while working on his doctoral thesis. She worries, as I do, that something will be lost by cutting out all that research time, but it's hard to argue with the convenience of this tool, which is the best I've found for quickly gathering academic sources on a topic.
<h2 id="2-character-ai-3″>2. Character.ai
they told me Character.ai It's popular with high school and college students, and it's not hard to see why. Unlike many ai tools, Character.ai is designed with fun in mind. It allows you to create characters from existing TV shows and movies, or even develop your own. It then allows you to have real conversations with each one. Sure, Gandalf The Grey's advice to me was trite and generic, but it was more fun than talking to an emotionless ChatGPT.
There is the potential for students to speak with historical figures, as well as science icons, and engage with various topics in creative ways. That said, the tool does not yet have adequate educational safeguards, so I would not recommend using it with students yet. But expect to receive more information about this tool in the near future.
Character.ai was founded by Noam Shazeer after he left Google, who was so impressed with the new app that they paid billions to bring Shazeer back.
3. Debunk the robot
Fake news and conspiracy thinking seem to be more widespread today than at any other time in my life. DiscreditBot is a conspiracy-debunking ai tool designed by researchers at MIT and elsewhere to get people to think critically about their beliefs through dialogue.
After my initial tests with the tool, I was a little skeptical, but as I explored DebunkBot more, I became more and more impressed. I'm still thinking about a conversation I had with him about the limits of Occam's Razor.
I plan to use this tool with my journalism students as a way to help them question official narratives, but also avoid falling down “nothing is true” rabbit holes. It's also a tool that seems to lend itself well to many lessons, from science to history.
<h2 id="4-otter-ai-3″>4. Otter.ai
I am sometimes critical of ai and all the hype surrounding it, but there are some tools that I have embraced. For example, I have become so dependent on Otter.ai that if it shut down and I couldn't find a replacement tool that did the same thing, I would quit all my jobs, leave society, and go into the woods.
This ai transcription tool is very useful for my work as a journalist and is a favorite of all the journalists or journalism students to whom I have recommended it. Of course, not all educational topics require as many interviews as journalism; Still, Otter.ai also helps summarize recorded meetings and lectures. In addition to providing an ai transcription, Otter.ai will offer a summary of the key points of each recording.
When this tool first debuted, I didn't think it would work, but it really does a great job of summarizing each recording. Like almost all artificial intelligence tools, it is not perfect. It often mangled words, especially when the recording quality is poor, but overall, using Otter.ai dramatically reduces the tedious time of transcribing interviews.
For me, that's what I want from ai: decrease the time it takes to complete mundane tasks so I have more time to focus on complex, creative ones.
