You do not have to be an AI expert to help students develop a critical and thoughtful stance toward AI. Knowing a couple of key points about the nature of AI is enough: AI tools draw upon huge datasets to quickly perform tasks, and do so in ways that resemble human problem-solving and decision-making.
These capabilities can be incredibly useful to expert researchers, but they can also impede students’ development of foundational skills and knowledge. Therefore it is crucial that instructors have candid conversations with students about AI. The following strategies can help instructors communicate with students about AI and increase students’ motivation to develop their own skills and ideas.
- Set expectations about student use of AI. Establish a policy for your course around the use of generative AI and communicate this with students through the syllabus and/or assignment prompts. Here are some strategies for setting students’ expectations around AI in your syllabus and assignments.
- Remind students that AI only seems competent. The accuracy of generative AI output is only probabilistic, but because the responses are so quick and varied, it is easy to mistake AI output for actual “intelligence” or human thought. Yet AI only appears to think. AI output simply conforms to the patterns evident in the datasets that trained it, and, as computer scientist Timnit Gebru has made clear, AI output often reproduces the values and biases encoded in those datasets. Students may approach AI tools looking for answers, but what they find may be unreliable or false.
- Explain what research suggests about AI’s impact on learning. A number of studies now indicate “that using AI can short-circuit the cognitive effort required for sustainable, deep learning…with potentially long-term consequences.” Using AI too soon or too often might prevent students from developing the cognitive processes and skills necessary for critical thinking (Lodge and Loble).
- Acknowledge that struggle is part of learning. Talk with students about how intellectual struggle is a necessary part of learning. Learning happens only when we move outside what we already know. Explain to students that when they use generative AI as a shortcut to complete an assignment—a habit known as ‘cognitive offloading’—they miss an opportunity to become more effective thinkers, writers, researchers, and creators.
- Communicate the importance of all college learning. Many students focus only on learning with clear connections to their intended career track and may be more willing to use shortcuts in courses they deem irrelevant. However, most students will change careers at least once in their lifetimes. Talk with students about how the relevance of your course may only become apparent years from now. The skills they learn in your course may transfer to other careers—even careers that do not yet exist!
- Discuss the social, ethical, and practical issues surrounding AI. The processes that support generative AI tools raise issues related to privacy, disinformation, environmental impact, bias, exploitation, and academic integrity, among other things. Discussing with students the ethical and social concerns related to AI can help them see the social context of AI and can position them to make thoughtful decisions about their own use of AI tools.