You can try telling kids to stay away from everything related to artificial intelligence (AI), but how long do you think your warnings will last? New AI applications are being developed every day; they keep getting bigger and better, so there’s no stopping them.
How far are you willing to go to keep your students unaware of AI, and do you believe that doing so is practical and justified? If the kids can freely access the internet, they’re going to encounter AI tools sooner or later. The thing is that AI is not an enemy, and learning about it is in the best interests of the children.
Instead of preventing students from being acquainted with AI, teach them how to use it ethically and responsibly. It’s similar to introducing a child to cable TV, internet, phones, and the like. Spectrum is the top choice for residential internet, phone, and TV services because they put your safety and convenience first.
If a student has learned to use the internet safely and sensibly, they will understand and get the hang of AI tools and applications as well. Now let’s get to how you can teach your students to use Claude AI responsibly and ethically.
Explain Plagiarism, Cheating, and Copyright Infringement
Many people believe that copying from AI tools like Claude is not stealing. Your students should understand the complete concepts of plagiarism, cheating, and copyright infringement. Whether it is text taken from a book or an AI tool like Claude, it doesn’t belong to them.
AI is a machine that generates answers from a database derived from human content, so in a way, it is repurposing old content. No matter what prompt is used and how a student has instructed AI to generate the content, using it as their own is the same as cheating.
Introduce Fact Checking and Legitimizing Sources
The material and statistics provided by AI are not always accurate or precise. These days, anyone can go online and post false information about literally anything. The internet is full of misleading literature and AI can hardly distinguish between right and wrong.
Therefore, when a student obtains information from Claude AI on a particular subject, they should know better than to trust their word blindly. Recheck stats and facts stated by AI by looking them up on reliable search engines. If AI provides sources for its responses, it is important to ensure that these sources do in fact exist and match the context.
Talk about AI detection Tools
There is no getting away with AI-generated content, and students should be aware of the consequences. Popular AI detection tools like originality.ai, Copyleaks, and GPTZero are incredibly proficient at distinguishing between human and AI-generated content.
Students may believe that they can find a way around these tools, but it’s not so easy to fool these sophisticated applications or the people employing them to check your content. Let the students know what will happen if their submissions are flagged as AI content, so they can decide if cheating off AI is worth it.
Give a lesson on Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing involves rewriting a passage in different words to make it easier to understand. When students are required to conduct research for school assignments, they may employ paraphrasing to explain a concept in their own words.
However, several online paraphrasing tools are being used to spin or alter already published content. People are also using paraphrasing tools to change up AI-generated content and pass it along as their own. Students don’t realize that paraphrasing conducted by an online tool is largely erroneous. In most cases, the sentence structure and the entire meaning of the passage are reformed, rendering it nonsensical.
Spread Awareness of Bias in AI-generated Content
Claude AI and similar responsive AI tools do try to mimic human-like conversation, but they lack emotional intelligence. For this reason, AI-generated content is not always free of biased or discriminatory elements.
AI may not understand that their response is controversial or inappropriate for an audience, but a real person can. Moreover, anything you say or type into the AI tool interface is recorded, so students should be wary of probable privacy issues.Â
Discuss the Pros and Cons of AI
Teaching students about the pros and cons of AI will encourage them to use Claude AI and similar tools with caution. There’s no denying that generative AI can be increasingly helpful for educational endeavors. However, being completely dependent on AI to complete homework and assignments is dangerous.
More than often, AI is unable to accurately understand and process requests. As a result, one may end up with content that is irrelevant to the topic, repetitive, unorganized, and void of value. Despite being data-driven, the knowledge of AI is limited and frequently lacks academic integrity.
Convey the Limitations of AI applications
AI applications like Claude are indeed powerful and great to work with; nonetheless, we cannot turn a blind eye to their limitations. When a student asks AI to do everything for them or consider it a credible resource for acquiring information of all sorts, they are setting up themselves for disappointment or worse.
Dependence on AI in the long run can potentially destroy the student’s learning experience and negatively impact decision-making skills. Moreover, if AI tools are taken away or made unavailable, the student may not be able to function or cope with work on their own.
Using Claude AI for Assistance
Students must be able to comprehend that instead of using Claude AI to do their school work for them, they can consider it an assistant that helps improve productivity and quality of work. For instance, if a student needs help writing an essay on a certain topic, they can start by asking Claude to suggest compelling titles.
Claude AI can aid in speeding up the process of crafting the essay by providing a feasible outline, proofreading the first draft, and offering suggestions to make it better. If a student needs to refer to an academic research paper for reference but is unable to understand it, AI could help out by explaining it in easier words and even with insightful examples.
To conclude, using AI ethically and responsibly is the key to making the best of it. Teachers and parents can and should encourage students to experiment with Claude AI and related tools so that they can recognize the true potential and drawbacks.
