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AI has exploded into our lives out of nowhere these last few years. Midjourney, ChatGPT, NovelAI, and Stable Diffusion all seemed to appear one day and just as quickly become a part of life as we know it. With so many of them being available for free, their take-up has been astonishing. High school and university students have leapt upon them especially quickly. While they can be a huge help, it’s also too easy to fall for the pitfalls presented by generative AI.  Our alumni friends over at Pentanet know that it’s important for parents to understand how students may be using these tools in their schoolwork,  here’s some of their tips for assisting your child in using AI productively and responsibly.

What are the pitfalls of using AI?

A common issue that schools have been dealing with is students trying to use generative AI to do the work for them. Not only does this cut out the entire creative and academic process, but chances are their work will be rife with plagiarism and misinformation. See, AI is not truly aware, nor does it have access to the internet the same way we do. Its understanding of the world is built from the information it has been fed in the past, which may be outdated or simply incorrect. In addition, generative AI has plenty of identifiable quirks in its writing, making it easy for teachers to identify when a student has tried to use AI as a shortcut.

Make sure you take the time to sit down with your child and explain that many educational institutions use programs that can automatically detect the use of AI or plagiarised content in a student’s work, making it much harder to take the ‘easy way’ when writing assignments.

How to use AI responsibly

When utilised correctly AI can be a very helpful tool, it can be great for brainstorming and ideation; bouncing ideas back and forth with it can help them take form, and the AI can provide suggestions you may never have thought of. So, when your child is struggling to think up ideas or starting points for an essay, AI brainstorming can help them get started, but once they have settled on an idea they need to do the work from there in regards to writing and research.

In addition, it can be a great editing tool when you’re trying to get a particular tone for your writing. It can be very handy to write the first draft of a piece, then give it to an AI to edit for a different tone and pick out the pieces you like once it’s been rephrased. Programs like Grammarly also rely on their own form of AI to provide grammatical and formatting suggestions.

In terms of image generation, these can be great fun. But again; they’re a tool, not a way to replace the fantastic talent of artists all around the globe. An artist’s unique viewpoint and talents make their artwork so much more valuable than the hodgepodge amalgamation that AI can construct.

Interacting with AI-generated media online

It’s never been easier for content to be created with an agenda and the intent to mislead, particularly with image generation and the rise of deep fakes and AI voice mimicry. It’s essential, especially for younger minds, that when consuming media online, we take the time to question whether the content is a true reflection of reality and, just as importantly, the intent behind it.

AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, much faster than anyone could have predicted. It’s easy to accept it as the hot new thing and dive right in. But whether you or your child are engaging with AI-generated content, remember to be mindful of how it’s used and that AI is a tool to promote creativity, not replace it.


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