All about Generative AI… What is it? How does it work? How can we utilize it as future teachers?

In this reflection, I am going to analyze the use of generative AI, and explain how teachers can use this tool in the classroom.

photo source: Bernard marr

First of all, what is generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can generate all sorts of things, from images to conversations, videos to music, and stories to poems, this type of AI can come up with all sorts of media.

Generative AI doesn’t just create all of this out of thin air, it works on an algorithm, and pulls existing content and media from off of the internet to create new content.

An experiment:

I am going to do a little experiment to explore the capabilities and limitations of generative AI. I will be experimenting with a popular AI platform called ChatGPT.

For this experiment, my goal is to analyze ChatGPT’s storytelling capabilities, and see if it is able to evoke emotion in a reader.

I gave ChatGPT the prompt “Create a short story, no more then 1000 words, that evokes sadness in the reader and has a theme of friendship,” this is what it came up with:

story source: chatgpt, displayed by canva

This story follows two long time best friends, and their last walk through a familiar setting.

Reflecting on this story, I have to say that ChatGPT did an excellent job in following the prompts I provided. This story both evokes sadness and follows a theme of friendship. I was surprised with how well ChatGPT described the setting, it really evoked a clear image in my mind while I was reading.

I also provided the prompt “provide a picture of this story,” and this is what ChatGPT came up with:

photo generated by chatgpt

Reflecting on this image, it isn’t like the hyperrealistic photos you see circulating around, where people have a hard time telling if they are real or fake. To generate those images, you usually have to buy some sort of premium generative AI membership, and this image was generated by the free version of ChatGPT.

Although it isn’t super realistic, it does convey the general idea of the story: two girls walking down a path on an autumn day. One girl looks sick, clinging to the others arm, and they both have pale, sad expressions. I am not sure why there is an extra person standing in the background… my first thought was that it adds a creepy aspect to the image… which wasn’t neccesary or part of the story.

In addition, AI can sometimes have a hard time generating hands, and if you look closely, you can see that the girl on the left has four fingers on one hand, and three on the other. It also appears as if she has three hands, two wrapped around her friend, and one holding the friends hand.

Conclusion for this experiment:

In conclusion, this experiment was really fun for me to do. I was impressed with the story that ChatGPT wrote, I found it to be interesting and full of emotion. I was expecting ChatGPT to generate a story that was dull, and didn’t create a picture in my mind. However, it did the complete opposite and generated a story that exceeded the prompts I provided, and even brought in themes of nostalgia and grief.

The image that it generated was not as realistic as I was expecting, I am used to analyzing extremely realistic AI generated photo’s to see if I can tell. It did connect to the story by depicting two girls walking down a path on an autumn day, but I was expecting a little more from the picture.

How can Generative AI be Beneficial for Teachers?

Now that I’ve explored what generative AI is, how it works, and what it can do, I want to explore how we can use this as a tool in our classrooms.

Generative AI can help teachers by creating content, resources, and more!

The app/website Magic School is an AI platform that provides a ton of different generators for teachers to utilize. This platform is free to use which I love, and there is also an upgraded version you can buy. Click here for my full Screencastify review on Magic School!

The website Canva is one of my personal favourite tools for creating resources for students. This website offers generative AI techniques to build resources such as pictures, worksheets, posters, and more which can be really beneficial for teachers!

The platform TeachMateAI is also a beneficial resource for teachers to use. Although you have to sign up to use this platform, there is a free version that all teachers can utilize. This platform provides many resources such as an activity idea generator, a colouring sheet generator, a math word problem generator, and more!

In conclusion, there are so many beneficial uses for generative AI. I am confident that AI use has the potential to help out so many teachers across the globe. There is such a huge variety of tasks that generative AI can perform!

Potential Drawbacks:

Here are a few potential drawbacks I found for AI use in the classroom

-Over reliance on AI: a teacher could potentially rely on AI use in the classroom too much. This could cause decreased critical thinking skills and creativity if a teacher is no longer coming up with their own ideas.

-Unreliable information: AI is generated off of algorithms, but there is room for error, and AI can sometimes give off inaccurate information. In class, we found some inaccurate information on the subject of figure skating.