MASON, Ohio — Artificial intelligence has made its way into the lives of many — and students are no exception.
Mason City Schools has decided to embrace the AI trend and use it as a tool for their students, giving them the skills to use AI in the most beneficial way.
“But it’s important that we have kids being exposed and conversations going on in schools, cause without those they have no guidance right,” said Dan Little, a learning experience designer for Mason City Schools.
However, like with any technology tool, there are pros and cons to the use of AI.
“What we’ve slowly realized with any tool whether it's a calculator, Google, artificial intelligence, it’s a tool, right? And how you use that can either be highly beneficial to your learning or it can be a detriment,” Little said.
But what are the detriments of AI in the classroom? Some may be obvious.
“Don’t be over-dependent on it where you forget to do your homework or choose not to do it and say ‘I’m just gonna let AI do it for me,’” said Jude Fonguh, owner of Ubreakifix in Hyde Park.
However, other aspects you need to be aware of may not be as obvious.
Ethan Tharp, a tech associate at Ubreakifix Hyde Park, showed me the safest way to use AI, and what to be aware of.
After he typed a question into an AI site, the AI fed him back the information he wanted with links to where it had sourced the information from. Tharp said that this is a useful tool within some AI sites to double-check the facts of AI.
Experts say it is important to remember that AI is still in its infancy stages and it is best used as a research tool and you still need to double-check as if you were searching on the internet.
But it can also be used in creative and fun ways, such as creating a family AI-based podcast — which is something Little and his family did.
“We wanted to solely rely on artificial intelligence to write, our podcast, to generate the speech for our podcast, to generate the images for our podcast,” Little said.
Their podcast is called AI Nightmares, Terrifying Tales. Little said they trained their own ChatGPT bot to become a scary story writer, then gave it prompts, and had it voice the story it had written. Their podcast is available on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
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