When you hear the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) you might think of humanoid robots or speech recognition on your phone such as Siri of Google Assistant, but AI services are becoming readily available in all sorts of applications.
AI writer is a text generating AI freely available for anyone on the internet. The chances are students are already using this. If students have not yet discovered this at least it should be safe to say that in alla probability students will be ahead of the teaching community.
Ai writer works like this; you type in a few keywords, for example, “battle of Hastings, British history, Norman conquest”, and your email adress and then simply click the box “write article”. An AI written text with references is then sent to your email and you can retrieve it from your inbox.
In this example (the Battle of Hastings) I received a message and a link to a text to my email.
The AI generated text starts like this;
On October 14, 1066, in England, the Battle of Hastings, King Harold II ( 1022-66 ) of England was defeated by the Norman forces of William the Conqueror ( c. 1028-87 ) .3 King Harold II of England is defeated by the Norman forces of William the Conqueror at has’s Battle, fought on senlake Hill, seven miles from has, England .3
As part of a rebellion against the new Norman invaders, the Wake of the abbey was plundered in Peterborough .22
After the victory of the head, the count of mercy was killed in the uprising against William his castle and the lands of Dudley were given to William’s Norman supporters .22 It is possible that William the Conqueror planned to attack King Malcolm to prevent Edgar from protecting the aether heli and stop him from advancing in the north of England .22
Edgar the Aetheling joined forces with King Malcolm in Scotland and King Philippe I of France in an attempt to take the throne of English .22
For the full text please follow the link above.
This AI generated text, with some adjustments, would cause trouble for the anti-plagiarism tools used in many Learning Management Platforms (LMS), but would probably not slip past the experienced teacher. In my experience teachers tend to know their students and how they write, and would react to a change of style and level of proficiency. At this point the AI writer is still quite rudimentary, but AIs are developing at breakneck speed and we should keep an eye on what they can (and cannot) do.
I will be posting ideas on how you can use an AI writer as a teaching and learning tools instead of battling it as sneaky sources of plagiarism (which it can be).
Other posts on this topic
The AI that recognises writing style
Teach using AI-writer
This post was edited and updated 2019-03-18
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