Session 35 Lightning talk: Tackling AI head-on: teaching how to use it while discouraging academic misconduct

Abstract

Session overview:

We would like to share at the conference details of a session we ran to introduce L4 news and sports journalism students to using generative Artificial Intelligence, while also discouraging them from using it inappropriately. We were aware that attitudes towards AI in higher education are changing and wanted to create a session that started students on a journey to becoming AI literate while also understanding the potential pitfalls. 

A particular worry for colleagues who teach news writing is that students could use tools such as ChatGPT to generate work and submit it as their own. To try to tackle this head-on, we came up with the idea for this session.

They would be taught what AI is, how it works, and about public opinion surrounding its use in journalism. They would also cover some of the issues with using AI such as hallucinations, ethical issues, and bias.

Students were then given the task of using ChatGPT to write a news story. They were given a press release to use and could adapt their prompt as necessary to make changes to the response.

The thought behind the session was to show students that ChatGPT is not great at writing news stories, and they, therefore, still need to learn and demonstrate their learning of this skill. Even if they could choose to use AI to write their news stories, they would need to edit the story to make it publishable, and of course, check for any inaccuracies introduced by the technology.

Key learning points from this session:

We are aware that there may be other colleagues grappling with similar issues of how to teach AI while not encouraging academic misconduct. We initially apprehensive about running this session as it could have not achieved our desired outcome, but we were quite surprised at the students' responses.

Tackling AI head-on: teaching how to use it while discouraging academic misconduct PowerPoint. Only LJMU staff and students have access to this resource.