So I may have mentioned before my, shall we say, profound skepticism, regarding things like ChatGPT and other similar tools, incorrectly named Artificial Intelligence.
Let me count the ways:
These tools are an environmental disaster:
- “The AI Boom Could Use a Shocking Amount of Electricity” (Scientific American)
- “AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning” (Vox)
- “AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change” (MIT Technology Review)
If that weren’t enough, these tools are bullsh*t as defined by Harry Frankfurter and explored in “ChatGPT is BullShit” (Ethics and Information Technology).
The author Ted Chiang (Sci-fi fans will recognize the name) indirectly calls it “money laundering for copyrighted data” in his piece on “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” (The New Yorker). Tech CEOs have already conceded that Large Language Models are trained through theft.
Also, Ian Bogost notes that their most common use is for cheating in “AI Cheating Is Getting Worse – Colleges Still Don’t Have A Plan” (The Atlantic).
At the K12 levels, “Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests” (Hechinger Report).
And they’re kinda racist, as noted in “LLMs produce racist output when prompted in African American English” (Nature).
That all being said, I found one AI tool I found helpful in Blackboard Ultra and it has to do with discussion boards.
I generally dislike discussion boards a lot. I often find that they don’t bring much value and can be actually detrimental to accomplishing my course objectives. BUT, when you create a discussion board in Ultra, you get this option:
And this is where things get interesting. Once you click on that button, you get a few options:
In addition to the description box where you would type what you want, you can see there is a dropdown menu called Select course items.
You will be shown all the content areas of you course and you can select the items you want to use to generate discussion prompts.
Once you have selected the course items you want, you can see a number that indicates the number of course items that will be used.
But wait, there’s more. You can also direct the prompt generation towards the different categories of Bloom’s taxonomy.
You can choose whichever verb is the most appropriate for what you are trying to do or leave the Inspire Me! option selected by default. I would never do that. Personally, I always use the Create option.
Lastly, use the slider to determine the level of complexity you want.
If it all looks good, click on Generate. The Blackboard AI will general several prompts based on your parameters. Pick the one you prefer and click Add. You can then finish setting up your discussion board.
Note that you will always need to refine the prompt.
This is not a time-saver but it helps to get you started if you’re kinda drawing a blank or you just have a vague idea about what you want.
But the main point is that the prompt will be based on your course items, not some gloubi-boulga (look it up, there’s even an example of how it’s pronounced, or you can ask me… and now, you will also know what I watched when I was a kid) pulled from all over the Internet.
Just for the heck of it, I ran some comparative tests using the Blackboard AI + my course items v. chatGPT and a couple of others. It’s not even close. The commercial AIs’ outputs varied from nonsense to downright incorrect. Blackboard’s output varied from “not exactly what I wanted but I can fix it” to “I hadn’t thought of that and I can work with it.”
It’s worth a try.
