Teaching

The only alternative, of course, is education. Deciding when “safe enough” is safe enough means coming to faster conclusions about the risks and social norms surrounding generative AI. Everyone involved in education – schools, universities, parents, staff, and the broader community – needs to be aware of the potential risks, and to educate students accordingly.

“I’m concerned that my schools aren’t embracing AI or teaching us how to use it,” said Jared Peterson, a senior at Allen High School in Allen, Tx. “For example, all eight of my teachers have warned us that we can’t use AI for any of our schoolwork. Only one of the eight has encouraged us to experiment with AI, but not on schoolwork. … [And] one of my teachers did a presentation on both the benefits and the dark side of AI technology, but focused more on the dark side of AI.”

“math gap”

To write effectively with the support of AI, students need to learn how to incorporate the following steps into the writing process:Set directions for the goals, content and audience that can be communicated to the AI system. This may, for example, involve writing introductory materials for the overall text and for each section. It could also involve writing much of the text and leaving some sections for AI to complete.Prompt the AI to produce the specific outputs needed. A prompt gives the AI its specific task, and often there will be separate prompts for each section of text. An AI tool can also be prompted to suggest sentences or paragraphs to be embedded in text that is mostly written by the human author.Assess the AI output to validate the information for accuracy, completeness, bias, and writing quality. The results of assessing the generated text will often lead to revising the directions and prompts and having the AI tool generate alternative versions of the text to be used in the next step.Curate the AI-generated text to select what to use and organize it coherently, often working from multiple alternative versions generated by AI along with human written materials.Edit the combined human and AI contributions to the text to produce a well-written document.The first letters of these steps form the acronym SPACE, so we call this the SPACE framework for writing with AI tools.