Impacts of Computing: Artificial Intelligence

Published by Mike Neumire on 12/21/2022

images generated by OpenAI's DALL-E 2

Artificial intelligence has arrived at education’s doorstep, making it a perfect time to explore New York State’s new computer science and digital fluency standards. While in the throes of a typical school day, the idea of artificial intelligence might come up as the backstory for a science fiction novel, but it wouldn’t really mean much else to a teacher in a classroom full of students, trying to teach and assess skills like writing. Now, a teacher can quickly navigate to an AI website and generate a functional, original lesson plan. If that lesson plan requires students to write, those students can navigate to the same website and generate quality, original writing that aligns with the given assignment. Students might also tap into artificial intelligence to generate original art that populates a poster or video assignment. New programs give the power of artificial intelligence to everyone, and leaves us to govern our use of it. Old systems of checks and balances in measuring learning may not be sufficient with these new sets of tools.

Chat GPT is a tool by OpenAI that allows users to make requests in natural language and get quality text in return. That means that an 8th grader could request that the program write a five paragraph essay exploring identity in The Outsiders and turn it in as their own, without triggering plagiarism checkers.

They could also ask it to write a haiku about an otter who loves ice cream and sad movies.

“Otter, so fond of cream

Ice cream, a special delight

Sad movies, a treat too”

-Chat GPT

If you had an idea for a children’s book that you never got around to writing, you just found yourself a cheap and attentive ghost writer. Here is an example of a book idea I brought to Chat GPT that came together after some back-and-forth and refined prompting.

From there, I took the text to Book Creator, and put together some quick illustrations using the Canva integration. In all, this book took me 30 minutes to create from idea to finished product. If you wanted to take it a step further and really lean into artificial intelligence, you could create images with AI directly in Canva (text to image) or using OpenAI’s image generator, DALL-E 2 to create original images. You can see this in action in this video:

New York's CSDF standards include a concept area relating to the impacts of technology, and subconcepts focusing on societal and ethical impacts. These standards oversee the discussion of laws, accessibility and equity issues, societal and ethical impacts of new technology. While these standards can easily be met with rich discussions in the classroom, they are often overlooked because they don’t always directly impact the work that takes place in the classroom every day. That is about to change with artificial intelligence advances that make some traditional teaching and assessment practices obsolete.