A New Class of AI Tools
Flurry of apps pushes the limits of co-learning and co-making alongside AI
Up to now, AI has largely felt like a means to get things done. Google Maps finds the best route, Amazon recommends the right gift, and LinkedIn identifies new work friends. But recent AI advances have opened the door to a new dynamic of human-and-AI co-creation, ushering in a wave of digital tools under the banner of “generative AI.” This burgeoning AI toolset is spreading rapidly throughout education, helping learners to trawl through existential questions one moment and brainstorm counterarguments the next. It is even shaking up cornerstones of the learning process like how we study for tests or assess knowledge.
Though the landscape is taking form, the effect on education is uncertain. Areas like composition, storytelling, research, and creativity are already seeing an influx of tools that are re-orienting how humans develop ideas and solve problems throughout their day. Still, at a higher level, many larger questions remain: Who gets credit for ideas? Should educators encourage the use of AI in classrooms or on exams? What are the future assessment strategies if AI becomes the new word processor? In the era of AI proliferation, what are the future competencies schools should focus on? Will it drive greater inclusion or more disparities in learner outcomes?
Understanding the whole at once can be rather overwhelming. To garner a sense of what these new tools could mean, we’re publishing a series of micro-articles to offer snapshots of some of the corners of education where this new wave of AI is shaking things up.
Proposing and composing
OpenAI’s public release of ChatGPT in early December changed the landscape of co-learning overnight. ChatGPT is a personalized, rapid-response thinking partner that can not only offers ideas, but riff on them, too — and in almost any subject matter imaginable. For example, ChatGPT could be used to provide personalized explanations and feedback to students on homework assignments, practice problems, or exams. Students could also ask directly for support to solve a problem rather than spend time searching for responses on online forums. More extensively, the platform can copilot as a seemingly infinite curiosity machine and potentially supplant Google as a personal intelligence companion.
ChatGPT can also co-produce educational content such as lessons, study guides, and quizzes. For example, a teacher could provide ChatGPT with learning objectives or outcomes, and ChatGPT is capable of suggesting a rudimentary learning plan. This could save time and effort for teachers, and could also provide students with more personalized and tailored learning materials aligned with their needs (see below).
While impressive, there are notable gaps that educators and learners should take into consideration. The quality of ChatGPT’s expertise can vary by domain, and the quality of instruction is not always consistent. To solve this, the field of prompt engineering — or using the right combination of words — is emerging as a skill for learners in order to generate the most useful response from the chatbot. Communities are also pooling their experience to identify optimal lines of questioning for learning. For example, coders on Twitter have explored question patterns through which ChatGPT could potentially augment the debugging process for programmers, discover and narrate solutions as an alternative to Google, and even teach concepts through tutor-like dialogue (see below).
Not least among possibilities — and one that has been getting a lot of buzz — is essay-writing. To combat writer’s block, students can copilot with an AI to generate new ideas or invigorate their writing with more varied language structures. In one case, Mina Lee from Stanford University developed CoAuthor, a human-AI collaborative writing dataset based on GPT-3 (the basis of ChatGPT) to assist creative and argumentative writing. The dataset hooks into a collaborative interface where the writer is presented with several AI-generated suggestions that the writer can choose and modify. Such tools hold promise to augment human creativity by supercharging the ideation process as well as helping to pivot ideas in novel directions. However, this new capability raises important questions around plagiarism and assessment — which, fittingly, AI-driven anti-plagiarism startups are looking into. This all underscores the importance of critical thinking, as students will be evaluating and editing ideas as much as producing them.
That’s all for now! Stay tuned for future micro-articles on storytelling, research tools, creative thinking, and more.
This article was co-written by Josh Weiss and Miroslav Suzara, and published by The Office of Innovation and Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Education.
