Do you use Artificial Intelligence as a teacher?

I was recently thinking about how teachers are (or are not using) AI tools. Diffit is a great example.

  • On one hand, it allows teachers to quickly create differentiated worksheets for students. You can modify an assignment to make it easier or harder. Hello, easy differentiation in the classroom!
  • On the other hand, it suffers from the same problems that all large language model AI tools (like ChatGPT) suffer from: it can hallucinate and present misinformation that is popular in it’s training data.

Don’t believe me?

Ask Diffit to create a worksheet about who has scored the most goals in international football. Here’s the preview.

When I did it, it created a worksheet based on credible sources like Sporting News.com: Who has scored the most goals in international football? Lionel Messi chasing Cristiano Ronaldo’s all-time record.

The problem, as Correct The Internet will tell you, is that search engines have learned human bias. Even though the correct answer is Christine Sinclair, because the popular search terms and topics focus on male football athletes, Christine Sinclair doesn’t get mentioned.

So, Diffit created a worksheet that based on it’s training data: presumably publicly accessible internet pages. The internet is written by humans with unconscious bias. AI tools regurgitate and create content based on its training data. It sees a lot of the chatter is about male football, and so it guesses that those topics are important.

If you look at the four paragraphs in the adapted reading passage:

  • Paragraph 1 focuses on Cristiano Ronaldo
  • Paragraph 2 discusses Ali Daei and Lionel Messi as well as the next top ranking male football athlets
  • Paragraph 3 talks about how Messi may eventually beat Ronaldo’s record
  • Paragraph 4 summarizes the text discussing Ronaldo and Messi.

According to Olympics.com,

  • Cristiano Ronaldo has 128 goals in 205 matches.
  • Christine Sinclair (at the bottom of the page) has 190 goals in 322 matches (shown in table format)

If we look closer at the Diffit generated worksheet:

“Who scored the most goals in international football? Cristiano Ronaldo holds the record for the most goals scored in men’s international football.”

The second statement is factually correct: Cristiano Ronaldo does hold the record for the most goals scored in the men’s game.

But it’s not the correct answer to the question: Who scored the most goals in international football.

We know from Olympics.com that would be Christine Sinclair.

If a worksheet from a teacher is considered to be trusted information (as opposed to “fake news”) then is this an example of accidental discrimination against women?