Trusting the Technology

I just finished facilitating a workshop on “Trusting Cultures, Thriving Children” with the wonderful people at the American International School of Dhaka. On my way home, I started thinking about the nuances of trusting generative AI. As we consider AI as an educational co-pilot, what measures do we need to trust it as a competent, honest, and reliable partner in shaping our futures?

For me, competence is being able to access knowledge and use it in both routine and novel situations. In a teaching context, this means having a Mary Poppins bag of tricks to tailor lessons on the fly, while meeting students where they are. And when stumped? It’s about gracefully donning the learner’s hat. These are complex skills that take a ton of practice, as we all know. I often use the Four Levels of Competence model put forth by Broadwell/Burch (above) to think about where I, or my students, are in the learning process. So how competent is generative AI? We know that GenAI is always learning from the responses we give to output, definitely a good thing, but it does still hallucinate answers. This is easily fixed by prompting GenAI to tell you if it doesn’t know something and to ask you more questions to clarify your goal. So, let’s say GenAI, with prompting, is at a conscious competence level.

Is GenAI honest? It’s like that friend who means well but sometimes stretches the truth to impress. It’s not being sneaky; it’s just really eager to please! The trick? Just ask it to show its work, like a diligent student. By prompting it to give us the sources for the information it is providing, we are telling the GenAI to be truthful. We can also simply say, “Don’t make things up.” 

Reliability – oh, the comfort of knowing someone’s got your back, anytime, anywhere. 

GenAI is certainly available to us 24/7, whenever we’re in need, and, with the right prompts, it does give reliable output. My favorite prompt to help with this is to tell it “This really matters. My job depends on getting the right information.” When you do this, GenAI is more likely to give you even better responses.

So, is GenAI the trustworthy sidekick we’ve been looking for? With guidance and perhaps a smidge of making it feel guilty, it’s gearing up to be a dependable ally in our educational adventures!