One of the most popular things I wrote in March was this little piece about Hello History AI app. It caused a lot of people to email me with concerns about its accuracy.
The concerns that people expressed about Hello History were largely the same that people shared with me about ChatGPT and AI-assisted search tools. And those concerns remind me a lot of the arguments that professors had about Wikipedia over 15 years ago.
Before we go any further, if you haven’t seen the new version of Bing with ChatGPT enabled or Google’s new Bard AI, I have two demo videos for you to watch. This video demonstrates Bing with ChatGPT enabled. This video shows you how Bard works.
context matters
Just like when Wikipedia prevailed in our lives, we must remember and teach students not to take everything generated by search results at face value. To that end, here is one of my favorite examples of using context clues to identify incorrect information in a Wikipedia article.
In my Bard and Bing demos there were opportunities to provide more context for evaluating and refining the results. For example, the training plans that were initially generated did not take event timelines into account. When I provided a deadline, the results changed, but they didn’t change for the better. That gave me the opportunity to compare my prior knowledge with what the AI generated.
Before the Talk
For years I have had my students complete a simple pre-search checklist at the beginning of any research paper. I’m working on developing a similar pre-chat checklist for students.
The goal of developing a pre-chat checklist is the same as when I created a pre-search checklist many years ago. That goal is to have students account for their prior knowledge as they formulate their queries and balance their prior knowledge and context clues against what they generate their queries.
I definitely don’t have all the answers about AI and where it’s headed in schools, but I’ll keep looking for those answers. I hope you do the same.
Make and teach with animated explanations
If you’re looking for a fun new classroom project, try animated explanations. I have a self-paced course where you can learn all about it!
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