AI for teachers

What can AI do for teachers? We are a long way from having a full answer to that question. But answers and ideas are coming fast and furiously.

My first use of AI generated art this year was to assign it to students. My photoshop class collaboratively created a prompt in Midjourney. Why did they choose the elements of this prompt? It is a mystery, teenagers often are. But “Parents fighting over school closings at a Waffle House in Florida” somehow became our first prompt.

AI understands Waffle House we agreed. Students moved on to test, to find where the edges of AI’s knowledge lay. Looking back, that is exactly what I did when I began experimenting.

Next I used first Midjourny then Stable Diffusion to create posters for our Girls Who Game E-sports league. Stable diffusion did way better.

I asked ChatGPT to write 5 multiple choice exam questions with four answers each on the topic of Adobe Illustrator. They were good, I could have used four of them (the 5th was too easy to guess the answer from context clues). It took seconds for ChatGPT to generate them. I don’t use multiple choice exams any more, my classes are all project based, but if I did I would certainly see what AI could do.

I decided to use both AI art and chatgpt to produce an assignment I give my students: a graphic essay. It’s a shorter version of a graphic novel, typically I give students topic options, they choose one and each student does one page. We combine the pages, voila, class collaborative graphic essay is the result. I’ve been doing this for years, the topic “generation lockdown” has never been defeated.

I’m not finished with this experiment yet, but it’s promising. I’ll post both the AI generated output and the one I did w/o AI here later.

I’ve been listening, hearing all sorts of uses from actual in-the-classroom teachers. Worksheets, study guides, exams.

I did ask ChatGPT to write an essay about how AI could be beneficial in education. Lemme just say: it was trash! It sounded really good, but it was ludicrous, untrue, full of bs fluff but had all the buzzwords. Not so different from a lot of education consultant writing these days.

 

 

AI detection

It didn’t take long for someone to create a detection app for AI generated text. It’s pretty well done, returns a probability score rather than a definitive answer. http://gptzero.me/

The game has begun, the advance, the counter, I doubt it will stop soon.

What interests me more than a computational solution to AI detection is human one. Have you ever tried to learn cooking a cuisine from a culture you haven’t visited, don’t speak the language, don’t understand the common pantry items? I have, and I was reminded of learning to cook Indian food as I started using and learning Generative Art tools. What began as a huge question mark was resolved as I practiced, made mistakes, corrected for them, and pretty quickly I recognized the flavor of individual Indian spices and machine learning models.

Learning is fascinating, we know so much, and still so little about how we learn. We also know that while we can define some commonalities in the way people learn, there are tremendous differences and influences. I think thats why the myth of learning styles refuses to die, we sense that it was at least pointing us in the right direction of understanding that learning isn’t easily defined as it is not the same for all of us.

I was surprised at how little time it took those of us experimenting with AI art to be able to recognize it’s output. Not 100 percent of the time, but good enough. It was incredibly quickly that we made the jump from no idea to recognition. Human brains are very good at pattern recognition, even when we don’t realize we are doing it. What it takes to recognize AI generated art seems to be practice, repeated exposure and experimentation.

We’ve had a few more months to experiment with Generative graphics than with text. Will more time to adapt to AI generated text lead to a similar ability to recognize when it is used? I think its likely. Will AI continue to grow its skills perhaps outpacing our ability to identify it? Also likely.

Does it matter if we can detect whether something is AI generated? I’m sure the answer is some version of it depends but I lean more towards yes than no.

Artificial Intelligence is itself created by humans and we’ve brought our biases, our patterns, our histories into that creation. Given the way we use media and how it can impact our beliefs and understanding of the world I think its important at least at this early stage that we know when AI is involved.

 
 

Death and Life

When I first encountered an AI Generated Art app, I wasn’t sure how it worked. My students and I brainstormed, questioned, hypothesized. Our theory was that the app was able to consume, analyze, digital art found online and create new work based on it. We weren’t wrong, but we weren’t right either.

The current AI apps are not sucking down the imagery found on the web, they don’t even access it. But AI is being fed and humans are making the menu decisions. This leads to lots, lots, of questions, dilemmas, considerations.

I’m going to ignore most of those questions for just a moment so I can focus on just one thing. Artificial life after death.

 

nvinkpunk detailed Portrait of a beautiful sad Muslim teenage girl -Body distortion, watermark Steps: 30, Sampler: Euler Ancestral, Guidance Scale: 7.5, Seed: 2944279188, Size: 512×512, Model: inkpunk_v2_f16.ckpt, Strength: 1.0

AI is currently growing out of the libraries we use for training. And the technology for training AI, for building those libraries we use is becoming accessible. This opens a window that sounds very much like, and yet is different from, a long held fantasy of science fiction writers, one that dovetails with a dream of techno geeks. Can technology assist us in living on after death?

Can a brain live on in a jar? Can we find a way to upload consciousness to the cloud? How different, or similar, is this from the path our ancestors took when painting on the walls of caves? Isn’t it just the same quest?

With so much of our lives being digital does the data exist to build libraries of who we are? Every email, text, social media post, every recipe, online order, prescription, spotify list, google search, we are leaving footprints, wax and pigment on cave walls. All of it is data that could be used to build libraries.

How far away are apps that use libraries that we can create from our already existing data? Are they the future of memoir?

How would it change the way young people interact with technology if they knew they were always contributing to a personal library that could exist beyond their own lives?

 

Getting here

In 2021 I came across Wombo Dream. It was calling itself artificial intelligence created art. I wasn’t convinced it really lived up to the title but it was definitely interesting. I introduced it to my Adobe students and turned them loose. They liked it, created some cool stuff, modifying the generated images in the Adobe software they were learning.

2022 was when things really changed. I tried DALL-E, Midjouney, Stable Diffusion, my students tried a lot of different tools and things were getting interesting. Then ChatGPT entered the scene. Minds were blown. The questions about how artificial intelligence would impact education were fast, furious and loud. The solutions offered were sometimes hilarious. But neither the questions or the answers were being written by actual teachers.


Lets clear a few things up.

No, assigning essays written by hand in class without internet access is not a solution teachers will be adopting to prevent cheating. That’s ridiculous.

Teachers have always dealt with some students attempting to cheat. Always. Before the internet even. We’ll adjust.

Teachers won’t be replaced by artificial intelligence, neither will digital artists, and students will still learn how to write, code, and create art. The sky is not falling.

Education needed to change. Teachers have been shouting it for years. Its unclear if AI will spur the types of changes in education teachers have been advocating for, but there is room to hope.

The second half of 2022 brought major advances in AI but it’s far from over. Buckle up.

Unleashed

Have you heard? Educators everywhere are panicking about AI tools, ask anyone.


Oh, no one asked educators? Of course not, that’s how journalism, educational consultants, politicians and education itself works these days.

I’m a high school teacher, I’m not alarmed, worried, freaked out or concerned about artificial intelligence in education. I am curious, excited, looking forward to seeing how teachers and students will use these new tools. I teach graphics and digital art, game design and development, and like every high school teacher -literacy. If I’m not worried why are you?

Hello world!

After all these years, that is still the one true way to begin any tech endeavor.

I used to use this domain for a tech development company. Now it will be a place where I can think outloud about the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on education.