Artificial Intelligence in Education

As an educator, you have probably encountered (or have been anticipating) the question from students: Why do I have to do this when AI can do it?

There are many answers to this question, but here are two to get you started:

1. While the content of a college education is important, an equally important component is learning how to think. By doing your school work, you are using your mind to reason through problems. These reasoning and thinking skills will stay with you throughout your life.
2. You are right, AI can come up with an answer, and a future employer might want you to use AI to do work. But, the employer didn't hire you to enter prompts into AI. They hired you for your skill in analyzing the response from AI. Is the answer correct, does it satisfy your need? If all you know is how to enter a prompt into AI, you won't be worth much to your employer. You need the subject background to be able to query AI and use its responses effectively. You are learning that subject background here at college. If you use AI now, and don't learn what I am trying to teach you, you will not be of value to an employer.

Watch an A.I. Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but... An article from the New York Times explaining how AI is trained.

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Prompt generation gets a lot of attention, some say it is of critical importance, others say it's not that important, just experiment with AI and you will get the hang of it. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Research has found that prompts with more detail tend to get better results. It is also helpful to tell the AI what it is (you are a college professor designing an introduction to philosophy course, you work for a company that designs innovative and engaging apps...) The more specific you can get, the more the AI has to work with

Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, and his team have developed prompts that may be helpful in the higher education world:

Anthropic, the company that created Claude, an AI similar to Copilot and Google Gemini, has created a library of prompts. You can browse through it to get ideas of what AI can do.