Artificial Intelligence (or AI) has become more and more relevant every year for as long as I can remember. AI had recently, however, become a bit of a hot topic among educators who see the danger in AI and how it can be used to bypass the collection of information. Using things like ChatGPT or even Snapchat AI, students can gauge a variety of information and even use these platforms to write entire papers or pass off the work of a computer as their own. While I find these uses of AI illicit, there is certainly a way to use these tools to gain ideas and direction for school projects. I use AI fairly frequently in my writing and lesson planning, but never use exact ideas and concepts. Using ChatGPT, I will often farm for skeletons of ideas and create the muscle around them. One AI tool I have begun using recently, and have found works to great success, is Grammarly. I was introduced to Grammarly this semester, and I honestly wonder how I ever got on without it.
Using Grammarly, I have been able to create more concise work and pay attention to moments in my writing wherein I use too much or too little detail. This AI tool has been a lifesaver, as it gives recommendations for a variety of different things. If you look at the screenshot below, you can see me actually using this for an Assessment paper, and you can see that it gives AI-generated recommendations based on your own language, and based on clarity, correctness, engagement, and delivery.
Again, this is an amazing tool, but like most AI tools, it needs to be monitored. If you are given 50 recommendations for a written paper from Grammarly, it might be tempting to just accept all recommended changes, but with most technology, I have found there is a small margin of error. While I believe it is rare, I have sometimes found that recommendations actually cause your sentence to make less sense, and therefore, each use of Grammarly should be carefully monitored. When I go through my suggestions at the end of a writing session, I look at the sentence structure and context of every possible correction. This ensures that, even if Grammarly is creating a more concise piece of written work, it is still my work and my voice. See below: me using Grammarly for this EXACT blog post.
When I was going through middle school and elementary school, I distinctly recall wondering about spell check, which would have been relatively new at the time, and wondering if using spell check constituted cheating (I used it every time anyway) now look at the new tools that exist and how students could use them both for productivity (such as how I describe my experience with Grammarly) and the purpose of rushing and staking a claim on material not created specifically by the student. The debate is a questionable one, to say the least. I imagine that shortly, certain AI programs will become completely trackable by schools, and certain tools (such as Chat GPT) will likely become blocked, restricted, and maybe even banned in schools.