AI develops critical thinking and demonstrates human creativity - teacher's experiences of SINCOE pilot

A Spanish-speaking student returned excellent essay answers in Finnish. He used them to demonstrate in-depth understanding and analysis of the issue. He had used an AI-generated translation program. Both the student and the teacher communicated in their mother language, which allowed for nuanced analysis that would not have taken place in English. This is a great example that the future is already here.

Artificial intelligence to help students

During the pilot course of the SINCOE project (Supporting Innovation Competence Development in Online Education), I have taught and encouraged journalism students to use the ChatGPT language model in at least the following ways: Dyslexic students check their language with it. If you find it difficult to brainstorm, you can ask the AI for a list of ideas. It also helps in developing the structure of the story and coming up with different interviewees. I have demonstrated to students in front of the class with a colleague how to convert the interview directly into a story so that Word’s dictator writes the interview as real-time text, which I feed as such to the AI. I then give it a command to write e.g. A 500-word journalistic story where it uses direct quotes from the interviewee. The story is created in less than a minute.

Artificial intelligence in the development of critical thinking and creativity

Then, when we read the article produced in real time by ChatGPT, we see that the language model does not create anything new. The journalistic story it does is flat but neat.
AI doesn’t take away the work of a creative journalist, just as Wikipedia didn’t take away investigative journalists or Google took away scientists. They are utilities. Artificial intelligence also comes up with sentences for the interviewee to say. This is absolutely against the ethical principles of journalism. Demonstrating this in practice will hopefully make it clear to students how important it is to take a critical view of everything produced by the language model. For this reason, teaching AI is teaching innovation competencies and is a suitable part of the SINCOE project.

If you are interested in hearing more, please contact me: Johanna Ailio (firstname.lastname@turkuamk.fi)