Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significant potential in reshaping education, making it more personalized, efficient, and inclusive. Some examples include:
1. Personalized Learning: AI can adapt to a student's individual learning pace and style. By analyzing a student's strengths, weaknesses, and progress, AI can customize content delivery for optimal learning, resulting in personalized education for each student.
2. Tutoring and Support: AI-driven tutoring systems can provide additional support to students, helping them in subjects where they might struggle. These intelligent tutoring systems can explain concepts, answer questions, provide feedback, and even assess students' understanding of a subject.
3. Efficiency for Educators: AI can automate administrative tasks such as grading and scheduling, freeing up time for educators to focus on instruction and student interaction. AI can also assist in detecting plagiarism in assignments.
4. Data-Informed Insights: AI can analyze vast amounts of data to provide insights into learning patterns and trends, helping educators and policy-makers make informed decisions to improve teaching methods, curriculum design, and overall educational policies.
5. Accessibility: AI technologies can help make education more accessible for students with disabilities. For instance, speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies can aid students with hearing or speech impairments, while AI-driven personalized learning systems can cater to students with learning difficulties.
6. Lifelong Learning and Upskilling: With the rapid pace of technological advancement, continuous learning has become essential. AI-powered platforms can provide personalized, on-demand learning for people at all stages of their career, making it easier for individuals to acquire new skills and adapt to changing job markets.
7. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR): Though not AI per se, these technologies often leverage AI for creating immersive learning experiences, making education more engaging and interactive.
While AI presents these remarkable opportunities, it's crucial to navigate potential challenges such as data privacy and security, ensuring AI's equitable use, and addressing concerns around the depersonalization of education. As with any technology, the goal should be to use AI to enhance human effort in education, not replace it.
Except where otherwise noted, the content in this module is adapted from content originally created by the University of New Mexico and is licensed under CC BY SA 4.0.
1. Turnitin
What it does: Turnitin is a plagiarism detection tool that now includes AI writing detection. It helps educators identify both copied content and AI-generated text in student submissions.
How it works: It scans writing for matches with existing sources (plagiarism) and analyzes text for patterns typical of AI-generated content (e.g., predictable phrasing and lack of personal insight). It then provides an AI-generated percentage score to indicate how much of the text may be AI-written.
2. GPTZero
What it does: GPTZero is a widely used AI-detection tool designed to identify text written by AI models like ChatGPT.
How it works: It analyzes text based on perplexity (how unpredictable the text is) and burstiness (variability in sentence structure). AI-generated text tends to be more uniform and predictable than human writing.
What it does: Copyleaks is an AI-powered plagiarism and AI-content detection tool that supports multiple languages.
How it works: It scans text for similarities with known AI-generated content and provides a percentage score indicating how likely the text is AI-generated.
4. ZeroGPT
What it does: ZeroGPT is another AI-detection tool that claims to distinguish between human and AI-generated content accurately.
How it works: It scans the text and provides a probability score of how much the content is AI-generated.
Be aware AI detection tools have an estimated error rate of 1%-20%(+). These tools may produce false positives (flagging human-written content as AI-generated) or false negatives (failing to detect AI-generated text). Use these tools as a guideline rather than a definitive assessment, and consider additional methods for verification.
Hallucinated citations occur when AI tools, like ChatGPT, generate fake or incorrect references that do not actually exist. These citations may look real—formatted correctly with author names, journal titles, and page numbers—but they often do not link to actual sources or contain incorrect information.
Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Don’t Get Ghosted: Beware of CHATGPT Generated Citations: Research Library.” Los Alamos National Laboratory, researchlibrary.lanl.gov/posts/beware-of-chat-gpt-generated-citations/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.
"How Professors Can Check for AI Cheating in a Sensible Way." YouTube, uploaded by George Fox Digital, Sept. 26, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KNOL21t4jM.
"How Professors Can Use AI in Positive Ways to Teach Writing." YouTube, uploaded by George Fox Digital, Sept. 25, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk2vQFs8aY0.