For three McGill professors in the Faculty of Arts, the conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) in teaching took off in 2023. ChatGPT, an AI chatbot built on OpenAI’s foundational large language models (LLMs), had become popular one year earlier. Five days after OpenAI released an early demo of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, over one million people had already used the chatbot.
In the following months, it became clear that generative AI like ChatGPT would bring unique potential for AI usage. Unlike earlier AI machine-learning models, which were trained to make predictions based on a dataset, generative AI (GenAI) creates new content. In response to a prompt, GenAI uses sophisticated algorithms to organize large datasets into new material, including text, images, and audio.
Considering its ability to generate essays, computer code, and musical scores, among a myriad of other possibilities, McGill professors are paying close attention to GenAI in their pedagogy. In an interview with the Daily, Alexander Manshel, Associate Professor of English, said that by the spring of 2023, he had begun to closely follow the emerging discourse that claimed GenAI would “change everything.” For Dr. Manshel, it was not that GenAI was necessarily a transformative technology in itself. He recognized it as “something major that would have to be reckoned with in education.”
Initially, Dr. Manshel was eager to experiment with GenAI. He told the Daily that he was interested in exploring how the technology could be utilized in a classroom setting on an analytical level. “What would it mean to project a generated passage from Toni Morrison or Colson Whitehead, and then spend the class analyzing the features [ChatGPT] is picking up on and testing that against our own sense of the aesthetics of the writers?” Dr. Manshel told the Daily that although such exercises may sound exciting in practice, his classroom discussions repeatedly proved “far more interesting” without ChatGPT.
Dr. Manshel took his GenAI experimentation further in an introductory undergraduate class in Fall 2023. When he assigned a paper, he told students they could use GenAI without any limitations. Students also needed to submit a document outlining how they had used GenAI. Their papers were then graded without Dr. Manshel and his teaching assistants knowing the extent to which AI had been used. Only after grades were returned did they test the results of students’ writing against the AI disclosure forms.
Dr. Manshel told the Daily that at least in his class, “the majority of McGill students did not have any interest in using [GenAI] beyond sentence-level spell check.” However, some students did use it more substantively. On the whole, the vast majority of those papers received low “B” grades. “It produced — to speak frankly — ‘mid’ work,” Dr. Manshel said.
Now, after seeing how GenAI limits his students’ ability to produce strong, critical work, Dr. Manshel “essentially prohibits[s] the use of generative AI” beyond sentence-level grammar check.
Jacob Blanc, Associate Professor of History and International Development Studies at McGill, similarly sees pedagogical limitations to GenAI usage in university classes. In an interview with the Daily, Dr. Blanc shared that “in my classes, I try to emphasize that there is no shortcut to doing research well, to doing a paper well.” Simultaneously, he limits the opportunities where students could easily use AI. His final assignments tend to be creative: a historical fiction essay or a podcast episode, for example. This serves a dual purpose of being both “fun for doing history” and “helping students not fall victim to this trap of AI.”
While Dr. Blanc assigns creative projects for reasons beyond being largely AI “fool-proof,” software like ChatGPT has changed the way he evaluates students on a regular basis. Like many of his colleagues, Dr. Blanc has begun to introduce weekly, in-class quizzes. “Is it useful? Maybe, as a check-in,” Dr. Blanc noted. “But I wouldn’t have done this if ChatGPT hadn’t come around.”
At the same time, Dr. Blanc acknowledges that it is difficult to completely prevent students from using AI. That is why he has recently started requiring students to submit an AI disclosure form to acknowledge how they used AI in their assignments. Dr. Blanc said he is “trying to force students to be honest with themselves and with me. We’re all learning this on the fly, so I really want to know how students are using it more than just when it is obvious to me that they are cheating.”
Samantha Damay, an instructor in the Centre for French Teaching at McGill, uses GenAI in a different way from Dr. Manshel and Blanc. Damay sees unique pedagogical benefits to GenAI for second-language courses. While Damay believes AI lacks depth and creativity, she acknowledges that in second-language classes, creativity is not necessarily the first priority. In an interview with the Daily, Damay said she primarily looks for “abilities to synthesize text, to apply grammar conventions, and to understand the language.” For Damay, GenAI can help students achieve these skills.
Damay encourages students to use ChatGPT to correct their own work. “I think it is essential that students are able to understand their mistakes and then make their own corrections,” she said. “That’s why I asked myself, ‘can Chat-GPT help students develop independent ways of correcting their work?’”
Now, Damay has created specific ChatGPT prompts, which she encourages students to use to improve their French writing skills. One such prompt asks ChatGPT to “indicate” errors but not to correct them. This way, students can utilize GenAI like a professor who highlights their mistakes, while still needing to fix them autonomously.
When Damay explicitly instructs her students to use ChatGPT, they are often surprised. But she emphasizes that she is not advising them to use it to cheat; rather, they should take advantage of it as a tool. “I really hope that generative AI becomes a reflex for students,” Damay said to the Daily. “Each time they write a text in French, they should take the time to ask ChatGPT to review their work.”
When asked about the future of GenAI in French language learning, Damay raises concerns about ethics and laziness. “We must see AI as a tool and not a solution,” she said. Rather than using it to replace human writing and critical thinking, Damay said students should use it as an “assistant.”
Outside of the classroom, Damay is worried that AI will threaten social connections, alluding to a growing number of romantic relationships between humans and AI chatbots. “That is what I am scared about: that people will lose their humanity,” Damay told the Daily. She acknowledged that “we are not there yet,” but that it is a real concern.
In many ways, GenAI appears poised to change education as we know it. That being said, speaking from his perspective as a historian, Dr. Blanc acknowledged that we have seen rapid technological advances before. “I guess I have to say that nothing is ever unique,” he noted. “Google was going to change everything, the personal computer was going to change everything.”
Still, he continued, GenAI presents many unknowns: “It’s going to change how we teach. And I don’t think anyone can quite say how it’s going to do that, or when.”