Don’t

       Use AI to write a paper.

Using any technology to do the heavy lifting can be detrimental to our growth.  Even spell check has hindered our ability to spell.  Any skills not kept up will deteriorate, so allowing AI to write the paper or do the research will weaken your skills.  AI will become a crutch rather than a tool.  Have conversations with your student about this and make sure they know that losing skills will hurt them no matter what they do with their life.

     Use AI to do the thinking for you.

AI can be a great tool to study and do research.  But relying on it too much will reduce your ability to do research.  It will also keep you from learning as much about the topic you are studying.  Using AI this way is the same as cheating.

  Assume AI is correct all the time.

AI pulls information from the internet.  Anything on the internet is fair game, and anyone can create a website and put anything they want out there.  When doing research, it is imperative that you only use reliable sources.  If you wanted to know the possible symptoms of Lyme disease, you would look for websites that are experts in that field, like the CDC or a large well-known medical center like the Mayo Clinic.  A person with no medical experience who has a lot of knowledge about folklore and wives' tales may have a website that talks about Lyme disease.  AI will pull information from both sites equally.  Be ready to fact-check AI.

   Use AI all the time.

AI is run by huge supercomputers, pulling, analyzing, and even synthesizing information at incredible speeds.  It takes a lot of power to run these machines and is quickly proving to be hard on our environment and our resources. Generating images takes far more power than words. Be mindful of how you are using AI.

Do

Use AI to help you write papers.

AI can be a wonderful tool to help you write papers.  I have used it professionally to write blogs, grants, and come up with names or tag lines to provide emphasis. AI can be helpful to get you started.  It should never be used to write all, or even large portions of an assignment. I used AI to help me write this article by clarifying thoughts, suggesting a way to organize the information, and providing information on the topic.

Use AI to aid research.

Search engines provide us with the ability to find information around the world, and from almost any source.  As the internet grew and more information was made available, search engines became better at helping us find exactly what we were looking for.  AI takes this a step further by acting as an expert in what you are looking for, organizing the information, and summarizing it for you. It saves us the time it takes to read every article or go through every page found with a search engine result.  As AI is used and more information is fed into it, it will get better.

  Use AI to study.

AI can help students study better in a few ways.  It can create study sheets to study for tests.  By uploading a chapter or section of text, AI can create questions to help students comprehend information more easily and study for tests.  This can be especially helpful if a student struggles to remember facts or to read whole chapters in textbooks.  Students who struggle with dyslexia or comprehension issues will benefit most from this.

   Take time to learn how AI works.

Like any new technology, we need to spend some time with it to learn how it behaves before we can utilize it in a useful way.  You and your student should play around with AI and practice writing prompts that produce the best results.  Much like search engines, the more precise the prompt, the better the results.  This is a skill you will need to build in order to take advantage of AI’s full potential.

Anyone over 40 years old remembers a time before the internet, or at least what the internet is today.  Like the internet, AI can help us learn and grow faster than before.  We must understand how to harness the power of AI and wield it to our benefit and the benefit of society.