HAGERSVILLE—It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding its role in our day-to-day lives.
While industries across the field find ways to integrate AI into their systems and tech companies scramble to find new and innovative uses for it, students and teachers alike are grappling with the benefits and risks that come from AI’s growing place in the education system.
The Press spoke with Kenneth Johnson, a science teacher at Hagersville Secondary School (HSS) for some insight into how students are using AI, and how teachers work to stay one step ahead of a technology that can generate an entire essay with a simple prompt.
“One of the first things I do in pretty much all of my classes at all grade levels is a digital literacy lesson,” said Johnson.
He hopes that by engaging students on topics like choosing the right source for research, learning if a website is trustworthy or not, and how to look for bias will help students continue to develop and maintain critical thinking and research skills through the AI era.
“AI can be a great tool, but it’s not a replacement for their own thoughts and critical thinking,” said Johnson.
As an in-person and e-learning teacher, Johnson has found it easier to engage in those types of discussions in a non-digital environment. In a classic classroom environment, he sees less willingness amongst students to use AI.
“I think it’s because they’re getting direct instructions,” said Johnson. “When you go to online students, you’re kind of removed from your teacher a little bit. You tend to think ‘well, they don’t know me as well, I don’t know them as well, I’m going to try to get this AI written thing through and see if they notice.’”
While he said many students continue to engage in the lesson of the day whether participating in person or online, some students have been “flagrantly using AI to do their work.”
He noted, however, “That’s an issue teachers have been dealing with since the beginning of the profession; someone else is doing your work for you and handing it in.”
There are many telltale signs of an AI-generated assignment.
“The flagrant uses are really like ‘wow.’ They use words or concepts outside the scope of the course. It’s Grade 11 chemistry and I’ll have students submitting university level chemistry concepts,” said Johnson. “They’re talking about entire things that we are not covering in the class.”
He mentioned how AI chat generators love to use certain formatting and will often explain the next step in the process in a manner similar to human speech, but “it’s not how we write.”
Additionally, because AI programs can think 30 to 40 words in advance, they have a tendency to produce sentences that are “perfectly formulated, but like half a page long.”
Similarly, when putting math or physics questions into an AI chatbot, “it will actually say ‘okay, now let’s substitute and solve’ and some students write that in their answer. Nobody writes ‘let’s substitute and solve’ in an answer – they’ll just substitute and solve,” explained Johnson. “I even had one who put a bunch of lab results into AI and had it analyze them for him. It started off with ‘okay, let’s break this down in a simple and human way.’”
On the other end of the possibilities, Johnson noted how some students are engaging with AI in creative ways that showcase how it can be used in conjunction with traditional approaches.
He highlighted a Grade 9 scrapbook project, in which students took part in a day of activities at Ruthven Park where they were supposed to take photos for their projects. Some students who were more focused on activities failed to get the needed pictures. So, they turned to AI to help them generate pictures based on the experience they’d had and what they’d seen.
Johnson accepted the AI photos, with the caveat that students identify the AI system used to create them, as well as the information the students inputted to prompt their creation.
“It showed their thought process, which is what we really want,” said Johnson.
Johnson has studied up on various common AI models, including ChatGPT, Meta, Google AI, and Co-Pilot, asking them the same questions to see how they respond differently.
Like with students, he said, “We learn their voices by reading their work and talking to them. You can learn the voices of AI and how they approach things and phrase things.”
However, Joseph warned, “It is already becoming more difficult. It’s becoming more sophisticated and that’s what they want; they’re trying to create a true artificial intelligence…. Responsible AI use means you have to read what it’s giving you and put a little work into it.”
He said that teachers in the Grand Erie District School Board have done AI workshops focused on making assignments resistant to easy AI fakery.
“As an e-learning teacher, we have special development kits just for tackling some of the issues that are really running rampant in e-learning,” said Johnson.
He noted that implementing personal reflections, links to personal experiences, and other things that make an assignment meaningful to a student makes them “less likely to use the AI when they get to talk about what they like.”
Of the existing AI platforms, Johnson prefers Google’s AI assistant the most, “because it actually gives you links to where it found the information.”
As AI continues to develop, Johnson’s biggest fear is whether or not students will ultimately become complacent, losing critical thinking skills.
“They’re going to say, ‘AI can do it, so I don’t have to,’” he said. “It’s a tool, we have to learn to work with it, but it can’t be a replacement for the actual work that needs to be done.”
