Series: If You Haven’t Jumped Into AI Yet
What Can AI Do?
While there is disagreement/confusion of what constitutes being called AI, let’s delineate common tasks people use AI to solve:
- Language Translation: this have been around for years, but it keeps expanding and improving every year.
- Create Transcripts/Dictate: AI can take audio/video and produce a text transcript. This is great for podcasts, videos, or even live meetings. In years past, this was only available to big companies, now it is everyone.
- Summarizing: you can provide something as narrow as a PDF/ website article or broad as a topic across multiple website sources to generate a concise summary. We will personally see this incorporated more and more in tools on our devices, e.g. summarizing emails and personal messages. This capability is also having a big impact on how search engines are structured.
- Writing Informational Narrative: writing informational non-fiction content, e.g. write a 500 word essay describing the difference between mastery-based grading vs traditional grading.
- Writing Creative Narrative: write a story by…
Let’s compare and contrast AI services hands-on
…Before we get started, it is important to note that many of these services require you to write a request or question, often referred to as a prompt. Writing a thorough prompt is a developed skill. Do not write off AI as worthless because you got an undesirable result on your first few tries. Approach learning AI as an opportunity to practice and become efficient with writing prompts/questions that produce the results you want on the first try…
Ramifications of AI for Education
…As educators, we need to cut through the “magic” thinking and focus on the capabilities that are important for learning processes. It is important to coach learners that AI is not a “friend” but a tool akin to a calculator. We need to help learners realize the AI cannot understand as humans, but only imitate narrow aspects of human interaction. AI does not have any perspective with life experience. As you practice interacting with AI, you start to see the types of questions AI can provide solid answers and what questions bring out the weaknesses of AI. Learners need to develop that skill, therefore educators need to help learners develop that skill…
