I am very interested in the subject of AI in general and AI in education in particular. There are so many ways of looking at it that I could (and have) spend hours thinking about this or debating it with peers. One thing that AI pretty much forces us to do as educators is to work on developing critical thinking with students. If there is one skill that AI hasn’t yet made useless (and likely never will) it is the ability to think critically about the world around us.

One way to use AI in classrooms without being “outsmarted” by it, so to speak, is to have students intentionally and explicitly use an AI tool, then improve on what it created, and finally justify their choices. The critical nature of these tasks ensures that students are using their metacognitive skills in ways that will serve them across the board, rather than for one particular subject.

However, one aspect of these Large Language Models that I’m still unsure about (among others) is that it could stifle our creativity in providing a “template” for our thinking structures, sentences, translations, etc. I wonder how many more, different, original things we could come up with as individuals if we made the effort of “thinking it from scratch”, rather than getting a basic idea from artificial intelligence to them, hopefully, improve upon it. Food for thought.