AI - Friend or Foe?

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

I remember the time ChatGPT was introduced, it felt like we travelled a couple of decades ahead in time - it was unreal and threatening. During this time, people spoke about the implications of AI all over the media and discussed all kinds of questions including -"Is AI going to take over our jobs?". The fear was real, and a lot of us made judgements and assumptions about GenAI without even exploring it. It's almost been a year since this, and we now have a plethora of services like creative writing assistants, personal tutor chatbots, text-to-image convertors, lesson plan generators etc. built on Generative AI Models.

Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to use AI in a number of ways in my role as a learning designer, and later as a student here at HGSE and It's safe to say that I have overcome the fear of AI taking over my job. However, in recent conversations with some of my peers and mentors, I learned that there are still misconceptions about using Generative AI, especially in the K-12 and higher education industry among students, teachers, parents and policymakers, leading to a ban on the use of AI tools in some of these institutions.

I certainly agree that there are data safety, privacy and ethical concerns related to the use of AI tools; however, it is worth acknowledging and accepting that AI is here to stay and grow in ways we may not be able to think about. In preparation for such a future, it is essential for policymakers, leaders, and educators across industries to ensure that everyone is informed of and familiar with how Generative AI works. So how do we do this?

In the rest of this post, I will share some key takeaways I've had and best practices I've come across on how to effectively use AI, especially LLMs.

1. Augmenting Intelligence: When ChatGPT was released, I looked at it as a tool that was created to do my job for me. However, as I played around with it, I realised that while it was a great place to start, it did not always generate accurate and reliable information. While using Generative AI tools, it is up to us to partner with AI in an effective manner, using it to enhance our capabilities, and augmenting its intelligence with our judgement and expertise, as opposed to using it to generate final outputs.
   

2. Strong GenAI policies: In order to facilitate the effective use of Generative AI as mentioned above, it is essential to first create awareness about what this means, how it can be used, and the resources available out there. At HGSE, every course has an AI Policy, which mentions the encouraged ways of using AI for classwork. The University has also created a sandbox for us to explore its capabilities further in a safer environment, along with multiple other resources to support our use of AI. This includes Workshops, Generative AI user guides, Discussion spaces, and demonstrations among others, for both students and professors. This enables a healthy awareness and fosters a good environment to collectively explore and learn.
   

3. Exploration and Awareness: In my experience, the best way to learn to use Generative AI is through exploration - having fun with the questioning and prompting in all sorts of ways. Try and use it to create recipes, to help with your writing, to understand a concept better or anything else that you may want it to do! Now with OpenAI's custom AI agent creator, it's going to be a lot more fun, even for those of us who have no experience with coding. The internet contains a multitude of resources to educate us about how best to use AI and how not to use AI. It would be a great start to explore these resources and experiment with the tools.

As I mentioned earlier, one thing that AI cannot do yet is to make judgements like humans, and it is up to us to consume these tools creatively and ethically to improve our capabilities.