Talking with Students about Generative AI

While we are working to share resources with students about using generative AI, and developing AI literacy materials, it’s worth talking with your students about generative AI – especially if you plan to use it or have your students use it in the course.

You might consider sharing:

  1. Definition and Use Cases: Start with a brief overview of what generative AI is and how it works.
  2. Training Process: Discuss how generative AI models are trained using large datasets and how the quality of output depends on the data it’s trained on.
  3. Capabilities: Touch on how these AI models can generate novel content, emulate human-like text, produce artworks, and how they’re being used in diverse areas like entertainment, education, and research.
  4. Limitations: Discuss the limitations such as inability to truly understand context or human emotions, factual errors or ‘hallucinations,’ the risk of generating inappropriate or biased content, and the challenge of generating long, coherent narratives.
  5. Ethical Considerations: Discuss ethical issues such as potential misuse of AI-generated content for disinformation or deepfakes, copyright considerations, and privacy issues related to the use of personal data in training these models.
  6. Future of Generative AI: Discuss the future potential of these tools, including the role they could play in society and the kind of regulations or policies that might be needed.

You then might want to have an open discussion with your students – full disclosure, ChatGPT helped generate these discussion questions! but we edited them.

Discussion Questions

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Generative Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Learning at McMaster University Copyright © 2023 by Paul R MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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