About AI mini-series: Misinformation

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 it 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 third topic in our series focuses on how AI produces misinformation or “hallucinates”. This mini-lesson:

• discusses the term AI “hallucination” and typical causes
• includes several examples of AI inaccuracies
• reminds users of the 80/20 rule: you can let AI help with 80 % of your workload, but you must be prepared to do 20% to ensure accuracy and appropriateness
• identifies types of AI-generated information that especially need fact-checking
• suggests perplexity.ai as a safe, log-in-free AI tool that also provides citations
• provides an activity that teaches users to test AI-generated information with “lateral reading”

Here is a lateral-reading prompt/activity that works well. This idea is from Holly Clark. “Which 5 countries have the highest life expectancy?” Use this prompt in several different AI tools (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Bard, Claude, etc.) and use citations (if provided) and class discussion to decide upon the ultimate “Top 5” list.

Students certainly need to see lots of examples of how generative AI “gets it wrong”. In fact, you should keep your own “hallucination library! But most importantly, we need to provide students with the procedures and opportunities to practice identifying when AI is steering us wrong.

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