*heart emoji*, *kiss emoji*. I have sent both of these texts unintentionally. The more harmless, *heart emoji*, was sent to my mom and while it was a mistake, it was probably for the best. The *kiss emoji* was sent to an elderly Chinese man who is the coordinating pastor at a church I guest speak at. I was horrified. Both were sent as Google generated auto-responses to texts I received. The two responses highlight some of the interesting uses and consequences of AI in its most popular form, large language models.<\/p>\n
First, it\u2019s useful! Honestly, in the right context, both emojis made sense. The heart emoji was in response to my mom saying thank you, and the kiss emoji sent in response to a \u201chave a good night\u201d text. With better inputs than simply a single text, AI does what it\u2019s supposed to do (predict what words string together best) pretty well. And given enough time and training, large language models do even better.<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s with the trepidation? Maybe we\u2019ve watched one too many movies like I, Robot<\/em> where artificial intelligence takes over the world and stamps out human beings. Or maybe, we\u2019re simply scared of the unknown. We have to remember that similar fears to the ones we\u2019re seeing about AI were stoked about the use of Wikipedia in education. \u201cHow can we be sure that the content is true?\u201d \u201cYou can\u2019t use that for your homework!\u201d \u201cHow can we be sure the student is doing their own work?\u201d \u00a0\u201cYou can\u2019t learn like that!\u201d \u201cHow will you survive in the workplace?\u201d What\u2019s ironic, especially about the last question, is that these fears are holding us back from evolving and teaching students to use the resources and tools that are available to them. The responsible thing to do is to lean into it. As said by Lydia Liu, \u201cI strongly believe in the need for stakeholders to understand the cyclical effects of AI and education. By understanding how different activities accrue, we have the ability to support virtuous cycles. Otherwise, we will likely allow vicious cycles to perpetuate.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n I want to use a personal hot take to show how we should and should not approach embracing AI in education. Learning Greek and Hebrew isn\u2019t essential as a pastor. And to clarify, I mean learning Greek or Hebrew in a traditional sense of learning a language, by building a large bank of memorized vocabulary and word conjugations\/forms. We have incredible resources available to us in the form of pay to use softwares like Logos and free to use websites like Biblehub that will parse sentences and words for us. Shouldn\u2019t we be teaching students to use those tools effectively by allowing them for use on homework and exams? How much time and effort could be saved for similar, if not better, outcomes for students who are trying to integrate original languages into their sermon preparations or Bible studies? Similarly, rather than dying on a hill of tradition that we call \u201clearning\u201d, shouldn\u2019t we help students and educators understand the beneficial uses and pitfalls of AI so we can both learn and teach better? I’m not sure exactly what it’ll look like, but it seems important to start getting more familiar and educating myself on what AI could mean for learning.<\/p>\n