Today I attended a Pro-D day workshop hosted by Cari Wilson about AI literacy. She explained how AI works by collecting data and transforms it into tokens. Each is given a value depending on its location and probability, then these tokens are reassembled into responses. To explain this to student, she recommended using the “once upon a pizza” strategy. For example, if you were to type “once upon a…” into AI it would predict that the next word will probably be “time”, and the chances of the next word being “pizza” are very low. However it is possible that the next word is not “time” and AI’s assumption is incorrect. This helps students understand the AI curates the best response with the information is has, and while it is often correct we cannot know for sure.
Cari then discussed how age ranges are given in AI programs “terms of use” (Chat GPT for example) and this is important to consider when using AI with students. It also is important that your school has guidelines considering things like academic integrity, privacy and safety etc. in regards to AI.
We also discussed how it is still unclear whose intellectual property AI responses are. Most courts would say that whoever put in the prompt, owns the response to that prompt. I’ve wondered about selling AI generated content on websites like https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/. For example, I am working on creating a lesson about identifying reliable sources of health information. To begin the lesson I read from a list of media headlines related to health, and have the students guess which headlines are real or not. I used AI to generate this list of headlines for me, with links to the original sources. Because I have AI generated content within my lesson, do I own it and could I sell it on a platform like teachers pay teachers? Where is the line drawn between what we legally own or not? I don’t think there is a clear answer to these questions yet.
In this workshop we also discussed how other countries are starting to have AI literacy built into the curriculum. Some countries are even making it part of their testing. BC has not done that yet but Cari did provide us with some resources for helping students and teachers learn about AI. I’ve attached these resources below.
AI Literacy Lessons for Students:
https://focusedresources.ca/student-artificial-intelligence-lessons
Slide presentation: