(WXYZ) — As artificial technology continues to grow, educators in Michigan are now having to make a pivotal choice—will they embrace the new technology or block it?
In the Hemlock School District, three school administrators published a book about improving teaching with the assistance of AI. In Detroit, the public school district is updating its technology policies to restrict the intelligence.
Paula Lauren, assistant professor at Lawrence Technological University, falls in the category of educators who are embracing AI.
She says the intelligence is requiring educators to get smarter with how they are teaching.
"We gotta rethink how we’re teaching. We gotta rethink assignments," she said. "Everybody has a computer on their desktop. Everyone’s gonna have an AI assistant."
For Lauren and many others, rethinking assignments means including ChatGPT. ChatGPT is arguably the most well-known artificial intelligence language machine and it is essentially Google on steroids.
The AI gives human responses to most questions and it's even advanced enough to write a book report written at a 6th-grade learning level.
"Do you find yourself getting more done now that you have more tools," 7 Action News reporter Sarah Michals asked a Lawerence Tech University master's student who uses AI.
"Yes, exactly. Previously, we used to take one or two weeks to complete base work. Now with ChatGPT, we can complete in like one or two days," student Pavan Kuivella replied.
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ChatGPT has cut more than half of the tedious workload students like Pavan Kuivella have to manage. Kuivella says he uses the search engine to generate data and even learn the guitar chords to his favorite song.
However, Lauren says, "AI is useful, but it’s not perfect."
Sometimes ChatGPT “hallucinates." A hallucination is when the AI gives you an answer that sounds plausible but is actually incorrect or unrelated. It happened in one of Lauren's recent student assignments.
"This character Phillip Temple does not exist in the book. This is where it hallucinated and just made up this character," Lauren said.
And hallucinations aren’t the only worry, there’s also cheating. This spring, Detroit public schools are updating the policies to limit the use of ChatGPT saying in a draft that unauthorized use of it is a “form of plagiarism.”
At the same time, school districts like Hemlock are sharing tips and tools for their educators using the technology.
"I hear a lot with the analogy of the calculator," Lauren said. "You could do everything that a calculator does. What’s the value? Speed."
Similar to elementary school math teachers asking students to show their work, English teachers may ask for in-class written assignments.
There are also AI tracking websites available for educators to check what content was generated by a computer.
Educators like Lauren remain emphatic that AI can be an invaluable classroom tool as long as there is a “human in the loop” monitoring it.
"You’re going to hear that term a lot: ’the human in the loop,' that’s not going to change," she said.
