Naina interview 27

The speaker discusses the use of AI tools in schools and shares their thoughts on the topic. They believe that AI tools, such as chat GPT, should be embraced and incorporated into education. They compare it to the use of calculators in math curriculum and argue that learning how to use AI tools effectively is an important skill. The speaker also mentions that there are other AI tools available for various purposes in the classroom. They emphasize the need to expand the understanding of AI beyond just chat GPT. The speaker mentions that chat GPT is banned in their school, but they have found ways to use it outside of school. They also mention that teachers may be nervous about AI taking over their jobs and that there is a lack of teachers qualified in emerging technologies. They highlight the presence of specialized schools that offer courses on AI and emerging tech. you're a junior, right? You're a junior, so you haven't always had access to like chat GPT or maybe you have since you're in the kind of the technology world you may have been more aware of it but what are your thoughts about using AI tools in school and what are some of the experiences you have like with your teachers or with your peers? What are your peers thoughts on on using these tools? Because there's a lot of talk from teachers how it might make students lazy, that it might be cheating, that it might inhibit thinking, but then on the other hand teachers are also saying that it can also augment education and creativity and curiosity. So curious. So at my school at least, chat GPT is banned. We're not allowed to use it. They figured out the tech team figured out a way to like basically block it on the school wi-fi. So my thoughts are I don't personally agree with this. I think I was talking about like the calculator analogy but when the calculator was invented, right, we adapted our math curriculum so that it would also include the calculator because we don't normally graph things by hand, right? We don't graph like complex functions by hand anymore. We use a calculator or we'll use Desmos, right? A lot of classrooms have adopted Desmos which is like an online graphing calculator. So in a similar way I think, you know, teachers should also adopt chat GPT as a way to teach with it. Like, you know, give their students an assignment and encourage them to use chat GPT with it because I think learning how to use AI tools in the most the best way is actually a skill that many people need to know because unfortunately a lot of students think that, oh, if I just enter in the essay prompt like write me an essay about penguins that they're going to get a super amazing answer from chat GPT which is really not the case, right? You have to give it a lot of context almost as if you're talking to an expert or something like that, right? If you were to talk to your teacher and say you were going to like office hours or something and you wanted to help on this essay, right, think about how you would talk to that teacher and talk to chat GPT in the same way. So I think those skills also need to be implemented in the calculate and like in in classrooms because learning how to use AI tools is just becoming increasingly more important. You have said when I met you at that conference in your talk that you gave that you think generative and conversational AI will be the future of human human interaction with computers but only if you know how to use it on the most effective way. Yeah. So that's what you're saying now. Yeah that's exactly what I'm saying like I think that statement still holds true that you know it's meant to be conversational and it's meant to be conversational for a reason, right? Imagine as if you're having a conversation with someone. If you were having a conversation with someone you wouldn't just be like write me an essay about penguins like no that's not how it works, right? So that's the aspect and then you were also mentioning like you know there's not only chat GPT, right? A lot of people say oh AI tools but then the one thing that they associate it with is chat GPT. There's a bunch of AI tools like there's AI tools for making presentations, right? Those can be used for in classrooms. There's AI tools for making notes like study guides. There's AI tools for everything you can imagine in the classroom and I think those are interesting to use, right? So there's like perplexity.ai and then there's also other AI tools for like video and animations and there's also BARD. A lot of people have shifted over from chat GPT to BARD because they find that BARD is better or they should get over to perplexity.ai because chat GPT doesn't give you the sources of where it's finding its information from but perplexity.ai does. So you know I think there's also that we need to also expand the AI tools that we're using and what we associate AI with because the sad reality is that like people AI has become so popular but the reason what people now associate with AI is just chat GPT and that's not true, right? AI has been around since the 1990s. It was starting from the most basic neural networks but unfortunately people don't know about this. They're like oh AI chat GPT. Like no, AI is more than just chat GPT. It's neural networks. It's all the stuff that you can possibly imagine doing. Machine learning, deep learning, speech recognition, everything like that is AI. So I think that's also what educators can do is kind of shift that mindset of AI is not only equal to chat GPT. Right, so you said chat GPT was prohibited in your school but what about BARD or perplexity like some of these other tools that you're talking about? Personally, I actually haven't tried them out yet. I'm trying to access them on the wi-fi but personally, I've actually coded a website coded my own program before that lets me use chat GPT in my windows like in my computer but like it doesn't use the school wi-fi so I have many ways to work around it. Right, I was thinking about that because I thought maybe so teachers are saying just from some of the resources I've read that they think it's important to keep up with it so I'm almost wondering if they're nervous that they won't be able to get ahead of it and maybe nobody can get ahead of it since it's moving so quickly but that students are probably more advanced with all of the technology than they are maybe that's what worries them. Yeah, no, I actually had a experience last year that I can't tell necessarily I don't want to like talk about it but teachers are definitely scared. They're definitely scared like they're definitely 100% scared of AI because they fear that it's going to take over their job because yeah, chat GPT, right, chat GPT if you enter in a problem on how to do multivariable calculus or AP stats it can give you a pretty good answer so when teachers kind of see these things they're like oh what's going to happen to our jobs now right because I think also teaching needs to get we if you look at the average high school public high school right teachers are qualified in the sense of chemistry, history, english but there's no really teachers like how many schools really have teachers talking to students about how many teachers are qualified in like AI emerging tech you know what I mean like AI emerging tech, augmented reality, virtual reality like if that was the case schools would have to pay teachers a lot more money because there's simply not many you know qualified teachers and there might be at these like stem magnet schools but you know not everybody goes to those stem magnet schools and so you just have this like one-fourth of the population or like maybe like even smaller than that is like ahead of everybody else and so that you have like this like right I have a stem magnet school called TJ that's right that's right in like close to us they've they learn about this stuff right they have they have artificial intelligence courses they we have um biotech courses they have so many eds like you know real world kind of courses and the teachers there are very qualified not to say that the teachers at my school are not qualified but you know they're not qualified in terms of emerging tech right that's a good point