What Artificial Intelligence Looks Like in America’s Classrooms
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From bloomberg.com: What if you could chat with a Nobel Prize winner about their life experiences? In a small classroom in rural Evans, Colorado, eighth-grade teacher Nate Fairchild introduces a unique twist to literature. He’s not just teaching Elie Wiesel’s haunting memoir, *Night*; he’s brought in a customized chatbot that impersonates Wiesel himself. As Fairchild poses the question, “Is that gonna get weird?” he’s met with curious silence from his students, who are no strangers to AI. For months, they’ve been using MagicSchool, a platform powered by advanced language models from giants like OpenAI and Google. This tool has transformed their writing process, providing feedback and summarizing dense texts. But today, they’re stepping into the unknown, engaging with a synthetic version of a Holocaust survivor. As the students dive into this unconventional exercise, they discover not just the power of technology but also the profound impact of history. How will this blend of AI and literature shape their understanding of the past? Learn more about this at bloomberg.com.
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Read Original →Nate Fairchild had just instructed his eighth grade students to write a summary of a disturbing passage from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night when he dropped a surprise: He’d customized a chatbot to help them by masquerading as the Nobel Prize-winning writer and answering their questions. “Is that gonna get weird?” Fairchild asked, then answered his own question. “I don’t know, maybe! If it does get weird, let me know.”If the students in his literature class found the prospect of chatting with a long-dead Holocaust survivor’s synthetic doppelgänger strange, they didn’t say so. They were accustomed to this. They’d been experimenting with artificial intelligence for months in Fairchild’s classroom in rural Evans, Colorado, using a product called MagicSchool, which is built on large language models from big companies such as OpenAI Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. They’d mostly turned to it for feedback on their writing or to summarize complex texts, but sometimes more offbeat exercises came up, like this one.