LM August 2024

AI ... cont’d.

JN: Do you write prompts to generate the entire message, or do you write the message and then ask AI to examine it and make suggestions of how to reword it? ML: Ninety percent of the time I use my original thinking, my original thought, my original message and ask it to opine and ask it to improve it. A few times, just for fun, our Communication Director and I have said, write a letter, a welcome back from a superintendent, to an elementary school. Now we look at it and we say that’s really good. Let’s take parts of that, and let’s turn it into our original thinking because we never want to have artificial intelligence, artificially creating our messages. We have found that ChatGPT uses a lot more adjectives than we would use in our real writing. It’s funny. It does a better job judging our original thought than it does generating its own original thoughts, if that makes sense. JN: Can you give two or three examples of types of communications messages that you could use AI to assist with? ML: Let’s say you get an email from somebody and you want to respond. I have done, hello ChatGPT, here’s my draft response. Please assess the quality of my response. I’ve done that to make sure I’m actually answering the other person’s questions, to make sure that the tone is proper. I do that frequently. In addition, I’ve got to keep my Board informed. My Board likes information, but they like it concise. What I do, on a regular basis, is tell Chat GPT to help make this message to my Board more concise. I’m kind of a verbose, wordy guy, so that helps. Let’s say someone asks you for a letter of recommendation. I will say to ChatGPT, here’s the criteria for the award. Here’s the draft letter I’ve written. Can you please opine? Do you think this is a good letter for the recommendation? And it will say, yeah, you’ve done this, you’ve done that. But maybe you can put in a personal anecdote to make your comments stronger. JN: AI also has the ability to generate images. Have you played around with that? ML: In District 112, we do not share any actual images of students or staff on social media anymore due to a change in our practices. We will not use it to generate actual images of real people.

JN: Have you used AI to create PowerPoint-type presentations? ML: We have done a ton of experimenting. We’ve used the custom GPTs, we’ve used Slide AI, we’ve used Gemini. You also, if you want to get a little bit nerdy, which I will in a second, you can ask ChatGPT to create a slide deck for you using a virtual database assistant. You can export that into Excel and, from Excel, you can export that into PowerPoint. Make sure you double check, triple check, proofread and have a human get involved. We’ve done it more for research and development and experimentation than for actual usage. The bottom line is we’ll never, ever, fake it. JN: We’ve covered a lot of ground. You got a little nerdy. Any final big picture thoughts? ML: I’m going to be a little nerdy again and then I’ll do big. The nerdy part is that if you look at your board policies, they give you the authority to, and the guardrails to, get into this experiment. Another final thought is it is incumbent upon us really to inspire, innovate and engage. And one of the ways we can do it is by taking current technology accelerators and try to help teachers improve their efficiencies and remove some of the stress on them while helping create conditions where each child, every day, can have equitable access to excellent education. We support them in the differentiation and the unique personalization of their learning for their future. I have, and we have, played around with image creation. The motto in District 112 is Inspire, Innovate, and Engage. I asked AI to generate an image for a public school district that has the motto Inspire, Innovate, and Engage. And, after about seven or eight tries, it got the spelling correct. Again, it’s generative AI. It’s not human. It’s not perfect. It’s fallible. There are biases, and we have to be really careful about that. You may write 'give me an image of teachers at work.' You’re going to have to say, 'give me an image of people of different races, people of multiple genders, people of multiple ethnicities.' Otherwise it may just come up with whatever it thinks a teacher is from. I want to be crystal clear; we never use any personally identifiable information. Everything is general or generic. I’m just looking for content advice. I am not sharing personal information ever.

30 LM August 2024