Artificial Intelligence

What I Know

I would say I have a passing level of knowledge on AI. I know about it and have used it sparingly to write emails, but do not regularly use it in my life much beyond that. I think one of the the ideas of incorporating AI into your work or school practice is to take traditionally analog tasks off your to-do list, by having AI do it. However, in my experience, even when I use AI to write something or complete a task, I’m still going back and heavily editing it to make sure it still sounds like me, or I’m writing a draft of something, asking the AI to refine it, and then probably editing again. In these instances, how much of my time is truly being saved by using AI, probably not a lot. Yet, as noted in this week's content overview, the environmental impact of me using AI to edit is great compared to having a human do that work. All that's to say, I use it from time to time but I do not see it as a legitimate full replacement for any of my tasks. 

I attended a PD on an education based AI tool (Magic School) through my previous school district. While its possible uses are cool and wide reaching, knowing about it as a resource did not automatically equate to its integration into my teaching practice. I think a barrier of entry is knowing I am still going to have to evaluate the work produced by the software anyways, so why not just do it myself from the jump. Perhaps this perspective will change as technology changes. 

Exploration

For my AI exploration this week I tried some of the quizzes that test if you can differentiate between AI images and work created by/of real humans. Regardless of my personal opinion on the ethics and use of AI, it would not be realistic for me to ignore it entirely, especially as an information professional. Since it is out there, I think it is part of the work of teachers and librarians alike to teach patrons how to use their critical thinking skills, and not always take everything at face value. Of the 21 images on the “You against the machine: Can you spot which image was created by A.I.?” quiz, I correctly identified 15 of them as being AI generated. What contributed to my success rate in this is hard to say, some of the questions were tricky for sure. While I don’t think it demonstrates an inherent threat to human made art and creativity, I do think it speaks to the necessity of being a critical consumer of media. AI is a tool in the box, but I don’t think it can or should be a true replacement for using your own brain. Due to the widespread availability of AI being relatively new, research is ever evolving. As reported by TIME, reliance on AI has diminishing effects on critical thinking, generation of original ideas, and creativity.

Image Source: PeopleManagingPeople.com