About AI mini-series: Unimaginative

As the world of generative AI in education continues to rapidly unfold, it is becoming increasingly clear that we must teach our students about AI, before we encourage them to use it in our classes.

To make that easier for teachers, we are creating a series of “About AI” mini-lessons. These mini-lessons can be used in your classroom as a Play & Pause format… you press the play button, we teach, and you and your class pause and/or rewind as you follow along.

Alternatively, you might find it useful to watch the video for the mini-lesson idea and then replicate it in your own class, perhaps during that perfect teachable moment. Either way, we hope that you will take the time to teach your students (and yourself!) about AI.

The second topic is a fun lesson idea to show students how unimaginative and predictable AI really is. This mini-lesson:

• has students brainstorm 3 lists of terms: dog names, pig names and famous New York City landmarks (or Paris, London, Los Angeles, etc).
• has teachers use the same simple story prompt (see below) in several different AI generators
• encourages classes to compare the outputs from the prompts, but also to compare the outputs to the original brainstorm list – there will indeed be similarities

Here is a simple story prompt that works well. You can change the output grade level to suit your class: Tell me a story of a dog, a horse and a pig having a grand adventure in New York City. Write it at the fifth-grade reading level

Showing students the similarities and predictability of AI helps them to understand why their work may be easily identifiable as AI generated.

Check out the rest of the series from this launch page.