Introduction to Generative AI for Educators: What can it do?

• Write drafts of anything – blog posts, essays, promotional material, lectures, scripts, short stories. All you have to do is prompt it. Basic prompts result in boring writing, but getting better at prompting is not that hard. AI systems are more capable as writers with a little practice and user feedback. 
• Make your writing better. You can paste your text into an AI and ask it to improve the content, check for grammar and improve paragraphing. Or ask for suggestions about how to make it better for a particular audience. Ask it to create 5 drafts in radically different styles. Ask it to make things more vivid or add examples.  
• Help you with tasks. AI can do things you don’t have the time to do. Use it to write emails, create project templates, and a lot more. Later in this module, you’ll have a chance to try out using an AI tool to help you complete a teaching task. 
• Unblock yourself. It’s very easy to get distracted from a task when you get stuck. AI can provide a way of giving yourself momentum. Ask it for ideas to help you get started. You often need to have a lot of ideas to have good ideas, and AI is good at volume. With the right prompting, you can also get it to be very creative. Or you can ask it for possible next steps in a project or a work schedule to keep you organized. The key is dialog.
  

AI tools are being integrated directly into common office applications. Microsoft Office includes Copilot* powered by GPT and Google Docs will integrate suggestions from Gemini. The implications of what these new innovations mean for writing are pretty profound. 

*As of November 2023, McMaster faculty and staff have access to Microsoft Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat Enterprise) with their McMaster Microsoft licenses. When you use this version of Copilot with your McMaster credentials, none of the information exchanged in the chat is stored or used to train AI models. Neither McMaster nor Microsoft can access or use the data in any way. McMaster University will continue to evaluate other AI-powered enterprise services and tools from a budgetary, security, risk, and privacy perspective. This includes Copilot for Microsoft 365, which requires additional licensing costs and will not be available to McMaster employees at this time.

There are four big image generators most people use: 

1. Stable Diffusion: is open source and can be run from any high-end computer. It takes effort to get started, since you have to learn to craft prompts properly, but once you do it can produce great results. It is especially good at combining AI with images from other sources. Here is a guide to using Stable Diffusion (be sure to read both parts 1 and part 2). 
2. DALL-E: is incorporated into Copilot (in creative mode) and Copilot image creator. This system is solid, but not as good as Midjourney. 
3. Midjourney: is the best system as of mid-2023. It has the lowest learning-curve: just type in “thing-you-want-to-see –v 5.2” (the –v 5.2 at the end is important, it uses the latest model) and you get a great result. Midjourney requires Discord. Here is a guide to using Discord. 
4. Adobe Firefly: is built into a variety of Adobe products, but it lags behind DALL-E and Midjourney in terms of quality. However, while the other two models have been unclear about the source images that they used to train their AIs, Adobe has declared that it is only using images it has the right to use. One of the major benefits of Firefly is generative fill – you can use it while editing an image in Photoshop to add something to or alter that image based on your prompting.
   

Here are the first images that were created by each model when provided with the prompt:

“Fashion photoshoot of sneakers inspired by Van Gogh” (each image is labelled with the AI model)  

An AI video generator is a web-based or standalone software that allows you to easily create video assets without needing prior video editing experience. These tools can assist with tasks like erasing video elements, creating green screens, using text to video to construct scripts from a URL or blog post, and more. It is now easy to generate a video with a completely AI generated character, reading a completely AI-written script, talking in an AI-made voice, animated by AI. It can also deepfake people.  Runway v2 was the first commercially available text-to-video tool and is a useful demonstration of what is to come. 

Code Interpreter is a mode of GPT-4 that lets you upload files to the AI, allows the AI to write and run code, and lets you download the results provided by the AI. It can be used to execute programs, run data analysis, and create all sorts of files, web pages, etc. Though there has been a lot of debate since its release about the risks associated with untrained people using it for analysis, many experts testing Code Interpreter are impressed, one paper event suggesting it will require changing the way we train data scientists.  

Claude 3 is excellent for working with text, especially PDFs. It’s possible to post entire books into the tool. You can also give it several complex academic articles and ask it to summarize the results, with reasonable results! You can then interrogate the material by asking follow-up questions: what is the evidence for that approach? What do the authors conclude? And so on. 

Similarly, Gemini 1.5 Pro has a 128K-token context window. A limited group of developers and enterprise customers can try it with a context window of up to 1 million tokens [link: https://blog.google/technology/ai/long-context-window-ai-models/], but this is a computationally intensive process that requires further optimizations.

It’s currently not recommended to use AI as a search engine. The risk of hallucination is high (an explanation of hallucinations is provided in the What’s the catch tab). However, there is some evidence that AI can often provide more useful answers than search when used carefully, according to a recent pilot study. Especially in cases where search engines aren’t very good, like tech support, deciding where to eat, or getting advice, Copilot is often better than Google as a starting point. This is an area that is evolving rapidly, but you should be careful about these uses for now.  

What’s more exciting is the possibility of using AI to help us learn. You can ask the AI to explain concepts and get very good results. This prompt is a good automated tutor, and use can find a direct link to activate the tutor in ChatGPT here. Because we know the AI could be hallucinating, you would be wise to double-check any critical data against another source.