Jan 30, 2026 Reflection

AI, AI, AI

This week’s topic is AI! Like it or not, GenAI is here to stay. As such, it’s important for us as educators to consider how AI is used in our classes both by us and by our students. There are many significant limitations of Gen AI that lead me to be hesitant to apply it in most educational contexts. AI sometimes provides false information (aka halucinations)such that every bit of output must be proofread for accuracy. Teacher’s need to keep students safe, that includes safe from misinformation, and also protecting their privacy as discussed 2 weeks ago. GenAI in most cases collects data from users to help it train, as such giving student’s information or creative works to it carries moral issues. Usage of AI also carries with it ethical concerns such as the environmental impact, intellectual and creative property violations, and the issue of what offloading tasks will do to our cognitive development.

When it comes to environmental impact, the choices of major corporations have a significantly bigger effect than the choices of individuals. As such, corporate transparency is very important for us to make decisions about what to do in our daily lives to minimize our footprints by not supporting companies that are major pollutants. However, AI companies tend to hide their environmental data away from the public eye, and manipulate the data that they do share for their own benefit. Here is a video from Hank Green explaining GenAI’s water usage and the difficulties in finding accurate data about it.

With all that said, I’ve found GenAI to be quite useful in generating practice questions for worksheets, which I read through and edit before giving to students. Generating questions is a task that doesn’t require any of the student’s data, and GenAI tends to be accurate with it. The bulk of the work for a teacher is typing out what needs to be typed, and it usually isn’t a creative task. Since I edit everything before printing, I also make an answer key from scratch, and hallucinations are not a concern.

Another limitation of teaching using GenAI is that not all students have access to a computer, or may have to share with multiple family members, and those that do might have moral objections to using AI.