Secular Homeschooling with Blair & Amy

Our AI tell us that in this episode, Blair and Amy discuss the impact of AI on writing and education, sharing insights from their conversation with a friend working in AI. They explore the challenges and benefits of using AI in writing, emphasizing the importance of teaching kids to use AI responsibly and as a tool to enhance productivity rather than replace human creativity.

Transcript: Episode 5

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:00] Amy: Hi and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by Sea Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I’m Amy. 

[00:00:08] Blair: And I’m Blair, and today we’re going to talk about AI, artificial intelligence, and this idea came about because of a conversation that I had with a friend of one of my sons, and he works for a company called ServiceNow. I’m just going to read what ServiceNow is for those of you who’ve never heard of it. ServiceNow is a software company that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. And ServiceNow has they, let me think Goldman Sachs, Disney, Coca Cola.

Those are just a few of the huge companies that they service. So he was saying to us that it was really interesting. He’s in sales. He said, you know, it’s really interesting. The people that he’s dealing with, they either embrace AI and say, Bring it on. We want AI to help us with whatever it can help us with to make our life easier.

And then you have people who are so resistant to anything AI. They want everything, basically, what he said was old school. And he said, there’s not a lot of people in the middle. And I said, well, you know, there are some problems with AI. And he looked at me and said, so tell me what the problem is. I said, well, the other day I happened to see that there’s this new tool where you could upload some writing and it will tell you how much of it is written by AI. So I was really curious how good of a job it did. So I went and pulled a chapter that I had cut from a book in 2017. Not one edit has been done on this since 2017 and it was never published.

I then put it into AI and it said that 30% of it had been written by AI and I, so I said, so that doesn’t really work, because 0% of it was written by AI. And he said, how many books do you have out Blair? And I said, all told if you count the unit study, the multi-week unit study, 17. He said, you can’t use your writing to determine if it’s written by AI. AI used your books. 

He said, you’ve been used by the algorithm. And I said, what? He said, yeah, published authors can’t put their own stuff that has not been written by A. I. Into AI to see if it was written by AI because you’re part of the algorithm, and that was obviously that led to a pretty fun discussion and then everyone at the table wanted to know how I felt about it and I am not a person, you know, I’m not —what is it? There are two huge companies that are suing AI or two huge authors. I’m not them. So for someone like me, who doesn’t have the money to sue, you know, and obviously all the authors that were used by AI can’t put together a class action, because what would we all get? Like a penny? So that’s not even worth the waste of time.

So I think what you do is you just go with it and figure out how to use AI on your own. When it’s helpful, and how, and then you just have to recognize that if you think somebody’s work has been written by AI, if they’re a published author, you’ll never have any idea if they used AI, because it they’re part of the algorithm.

But I guess my feeling is, It’s going to be here, so we need to figure out how to use it. But now, I know you’re working directly with kids right now, and I am sure that this is something that you’re dealing with, because you teach middle school and high school, Amy? 

[00:04:08] Amy: Yeah, yeah, so, so, I mean, AI just kind of like, as we all know, like came from out of nowhere, right? Like one day, it’s like, oh, AI might be a thing, and then the next day, everyone’s using it. For everything. And I have all kinds of conflicting thoughts about it. The first thought that I have is that art and writing are two of the things that make human beings, human beings. And I’m not sure why we want to source out creative pursuits to machines.

I feel like just kind of fundamentally, philosophically, I, I am not sure, like, why that is what we’ve immediately leaped to using AI to do, because it can do so many really useful things. It can write a literature review for you, which is amazing. It can write an outline for you for a paper that you’re working on, which is so handy.

It can give you the five questions that people ask the most about, I don’t know, how to, how to start a saltwater aquarium, so it’s very handy for things like that, but it is kind of it is tricky because, well, because like you say, you can feed something into an is this AI checker, and you can’t be sure that it will actually check it, and there’s a problem with inaccuracy.

I mean, I’m sure you saw early on all those mushroom books where they were telling people to eat poisonous mushrooms because they’d been AI written and the AI didn’t fully understand how to tell poisonous from non poisonous mushrooms. So yeah, so I mean, I, I think it can be a great tool. But I don’t think it’s a solution.

[00:06:00] Blair: Well, so my immediate, by the way, response to Cam, was no way. And so what Cam did is he put in, what’s Blair Lee’s philosophy when writing science? Not anything, you know, around my name besides just my name. Okay. And AI gave a very thorough response that, I mean, my marketing team at SEA wants to use some of the language for marketing. They did so good. They’re like, wow, ChatGPT, which is the AI, service that, Cam used. They nailed it. They totally got it. And so I think. I, first of all — I think, we think it came out of nowhere, but I don’t think it came out of nowhere. 

They just brought it to the point where it could write essays. And I agree with you. The real dilemma is yes, there are inaccuracies. I put in something and I cannot remember what it, the question was and it gave me this book title and I thought, I’ve never even heard of Secular Homeschooling, blah, blah, blah, and I went and looked. There’s no book called that. They just completely made it up AI did. 

But, It’s going to be used. I think in education, what we have to figure out is how we can make sure that kids do actually learn to write. And the immediate thing that comes to mind is my absolute least favorite way to check to see if somebody can write, and that is in class writing. I hate in class writing it completely does not mimic the type of writing that real writers do. Right, Amy? 

[00:07:55] Amy: No, no, it’s not at all because real writing is about drafts and going back and polishing things and you cannot do that in a 45 minute class period. 

[00:08:10] Blair: But the other thing that AI can’t do sort of that innovation of thinking. That, that the human mind is so awesome at. But now you were telling me a story . Let’s segue back to your classroom. You told me that your high school students are dealing with it one way and your middle school students are dealing with it kind of in a different way and it sort of, cause the neurocognitive development of those two, we tend to think that that’s sort of a, this easy continuum and it really isn’t. 

[00:08:44] Amy: So I wanna say if you have a middle schooler, the chances that they’re using AI to answer questions that you ask them if you ask them to do any writing are like 99%. Almost every middle schooler that we have is using AI in some capacity. And so I think that this is, if you have middle school students right now, you have to talk about this with them.

You can’t just like pretend that you can say, oh, well let’s not use AI and they won’t use it because they absolutely will. So some things that I have found helpful., one thing is to encourage them to use AI to help write a thesis for their project. So have them put in a prompt, you know, that’s like, I am writing a paper on Ona Judge.

And I want to talk about, you know, her relationship with George Washington and how she’s self liberated… what are some theses that I could use? And ChatGPT will come up with a list of thesis ideas for you, and that can be really helpful for kids who don’t know where to start, right? Coming up with a thesis is really hard in middle school, and so ChatGPT can be helpful with that.

It can also be really helpful if you’re like, I want to do a report on Ona Judge. What are the five most important things that I should talk about, and it will give you the list of five things that you should talk about. But my favorite, my favorite strategy for middle school is to have them write a paragraph and then put the paragraph in ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to critique your paragraph.

What could you do better? How could you improve it? And then you take the notes from ChatGPT and you use them to improve your own writing. And so those are three little things that I have found have been really helpful with middle schoolers. So they’re able to use this new tool, but they’re not using it to replace their own thinking and writing.

[00:10:46] Blair: You know that I’m taking these courses through the Writing Revolution and coming up with the thesis statement is something that is a particularly useful philosophy for doin. I would be a little concerned with kids using this to come up with thesis statements because they are hard to come up with, and as long as you know you’re going to get to it in high school to teach that, I think that’s okay.

But. Right. The harder something is to do, in my opinion, the more a teacher has a responsibility to actually be teaching that, as long as it’s age appropriate, because if you don’t, then you get a student that never learns. My other concern would be that, that they give, that not all of the five facts are actually real.

[00:11:43] Amy: Right. Well, so that is definitely something that you have to kind of work on with kids because I think a lot of them think that if chat GPT tells you something it’s true. If it gives you a title secular homeschooling in the real world or whatever You kind of assume that it’s a real book. But you shouldn’t, and so it’s really good to have kids doing that early on and fact checking the chat GPT results because that encourages them to be rigorous about it, to be, you know, to not automatically trust what they read and to get in the habit of fact checking the information that they get from ChatGPT.

[00:12:21] Blair: I absolutely love the idea of having ChatGPT do the analysis of a paragraph. Though, and is it, does it do a really good job with that? 

[00:12:35] Amy: I would say it does a pretty good job. I think especially, because a lot of middle school students are really insecure about academic writing. They really struggle with it.

And I, I, I’m so excited that you’re taking the Writing Revolution classes. I think that you can see a difference in kids who have, who use programs like that, because they are, they’re much more confident writers, but a lot of kids who haven’t done a lot of writing are really not confident about academic writing.

And so they make a lot of the mistakes that you would expect somebody who’s not confident about writing to make early beginning writer mistakes. And ChatGPT is very good at picking those up. My high schoolers would not use it for this because they are writing much more sophisticated stuff, and ChatGPT is not as good at analyzing sophisticated stuff.

[00:13:26] Blair: Do you think that for middle school students, it seems like an easy way out of an assignment? 

[00:13:35] Amy: Yeah, I 100 percent do. And I don’t think that they’re doing it because they’re trying to be sneaky, or, you know, they’re engaging in bad faith academics or anything.

It’s a tool. It’s there. And it’s faster than thinking on their own. And so they, they use it unless somebody explains to them why they shouldn’t, or explains to them how to use it in an academic way.

[00:14:00] Blair: Well, I agree with you. I agree with you that the conversation has to be had because everybody is doing it. I actually was at a marketing presentation just because I was curious. So Neil Patel had his team, one of the top marketers in the world, had his team put together ChatGPT versus Gemini. And I signed up just to listen to it because I was curious. I wonder which is best. And I will say, we keep mentioning Chat GPT, but Gemini, hands down, is considered to be the best.

Although Niels said, look, these are changing so quickly that what’s the best today could be not the best tomorrow. But one of the reasons that Gemini is the best, which I did not realize, is that in 2022, ChatGPT closed itself to inputting new learning. So it’s not processing anything anymore. And that has to change, it’s hard to imagine them not changing that. 

Actually for one of the talks I’m giving in March, I couldn’t find an image that I wanted, so I went to DALL-E, so chatGBT4, just so I could see what the illustrations look like. If you want writing in the illustration, it’s really, really interesting because it can’t spell. Which as good as Chat GPT is at spelling, the DALL-E part of its program, is not good at spelling. 

[00:15:33] Amy: Some of the stuff that you can do is, is so silly. I know, I am the parent of a teenager who enjoys making weird AI pictures, like a dog wearing a pizza hat and like texting them to me throughout the day.

So it’s also good for, you know, staying in contact with your, your teen while they’re out and about. 

[00:16:00] Blair: So you think we should sit our kids down and say, let’s talk AI? I think in the future there’s going to be like short semester long AI classes.

But I mean, what do you think? Let’s give people the tips they need to deal with what they’re going to need to deal with. So you sit your kids down and say, there’s AI. Everybody’s using it, and this is what it’s okay for you to use it for, and this is what you shouldn’t use it for? What do you do in your middle school? Class? 

[00:16:30] Amy: I think, I mean, we treat it like we treat Wikipedia. Have you sat down with your kids and talked about Wikipedia and how it is, it is crowdsourced, and it is a great starting point for doing things, but it is not the final point, you shouldn’t use it as an academic source, but you can definitely use it to find academic sources.

You need to fact check any information that you get there. I think we should treat AI the same way that we treat Wikipedia. It can be a great, incredibly useful tool. We can be so glad that it’s there. But I think we actually need to sit down with our kids and say, Look, here’s what it’s okay for. Here are great ways to use it.

And here are things that maybe you shouldn’t use it for. And here’s why. Okay, what would your why be? Well, certainly, one of my why’s would be that you can’t be sure that the information that you’re getting is accurate., so, you know, you definitely would need to make sure that you fact check everything that you got.

And if you’re going to all the trouble of fact checking anyway, you probably will stumble upon other interesting facts that AI doesn’t bring up. Because AI is really general. AI doesn’t have, I mean, I, you know, I teach history and I teach literature, and I think the greatest history and literature work that people do, writing wise, is the work that gets into those really silly, specific details.

Like, I love the story about how, in the Victorian era, London greengrocers, when they came to sell their produce in the city, would dip it in the sewer because the gas in the sewer would make it greener. And crisper. I mean, that is a great story. Like, I want that in my paper.

[00:18:17] Blair: But not in your salad.

[00:18:18] Amy: So, I think, you know, you get general information, but to get the really good stuff, the stuff that sticks in your mind and is interesting and makes people say, Wow, I think you kind of have to, do your own work for that, that you don’t get that from AI. 

[00:18:39] Blair: You’re alluding to where I thought you were going to go right away, because you talk all the time about thinking. Whereas I talk a lot about learners in the context of education, you talk a lot about thinkers and thinking in education, and that is what concerns me. What I have found in my own writing is that the more thinking you do in general, the more sort of flights of fancy and connections and just a little more like everything is firing in your brain. Yeah. And when you look at neurological development that is supported. People that have a very active cognition, they actually have more connections across the two sides of their brains. And most people who you consider to be really well learned have a lot of connections. It’s one of the interesting neurological traits that you see. What do you think, Amy? 

[00:19:50] Amy: Well, I, I think it gets down to the question of what is the point of asking a middle schooler or a high schooler to write something?

It’s probably not to get a certain number of words on a page. It’s probably to encourage them to write. To think about something, to reflect on something, to develop their own ideas or argument about something. And if that is your goal, then no AI is going to be able to do that for you. Because the point of the writing is for you to do that yourself.

[00:20:30] Blair: Because you can use AI, I think the onus it puts on educators and curriculum developers is to make sure that what you’re asking kids to do is purposeful. 

[00:20:44] Amy: Certainly my high schoolers make fun of me and say that I write questions that are impossible to use AI on because there’s just no way to really use AI to answer the kinds of questions that I’m asking them to do. So it doesn’t even come up for the high schoolers because if they tried to use AI, it would just, it would be more work. It would be more work to take the AI answer and try to make it an Amy answer. 

 There are a lot of stages of writing for kids, and there are some stages where I think AI can be really harmful, and I think there are stages where AI can be really helpful. 

[00:21:22] Blair: Okay, what’s the stage where it’s harmful? Tell us. 

[00:21:25] Amy: Well, I think certainly a stage where it’s harmful is when kids are using it as a substitute for answering basic questions, right? Like when you’re reading a book and you’re a sixth grader you’re reading a book and you have a question where like you need to describe a character, right? Or you need to say what you think is the climax of a story. Well, you can use AI to answer that question but that’s not useful to you at all.

That’s only going to make you not really understand. You’re not ever going to have to be able to develop your own ideas because this is where you’re learning how to develop those ideas, so if you’re using sort of AI to, to skip that part, then you’re actually skipping that part, and when that’s the foundation for more sophisticated analysis that you’re doing in high school or college, you’re kind of screwed because you never learned how to do it early on.

It can also be helpful. 

[00:22:25] Blair: As far as the harmful, I think we can all agree, that’s where it is harmful. Best case scenario, every kid’s going to use it occasionally. Yes, yes, yes. I know there are like five of you whose kids are never going to use it, but for the rest of us. 

[00:22:41] Amy: Yeah. I absolutely think that we should assume that our kids are using it for, for stuff. And so we want to help them use it for the good stuff.

[00:22:49] Blair: So tell them, other than to edit your own paper, tell us. 

[00:22:54] Amy: So one thing that I think Chat GPT is really great for is, so I, I write sometimes, books and there’s that joke about what does a poet do all day, you write one word in the morning and you erase it in the afternoon and that’s like the work of your day.

I think that for a lot of people, not just kids, but people, getting started writing something is really, really hard. And so I think that saying, Hey, I’m writing a paper about this. This is my thesis. Write me an introductory paragraph. And then you start writing. You always have to go back and change your introductory paragraph, and I’m always trying to convince people that they don’t have to write the introduction before they start the paper, that you should just go straight to the body paragraphs.

Please tell your kids to go straight to the body paragraphs because you don’t know what you’re going to talk about until you know what you’ve talked about. You have to write the introduction last, it only makes sense. But for kids, this is really hard to do, so if you ask chat GPT to write you a get-started introduction, then you eliminate that step of sitting there staring at your page, not knowing where to start, and you can jump right into the body paragraph, and then go back and rewrite the introduction when you finish your paper. I think it’s really good for being stuck. 

[00:24:17] Blair: So, I have to write the introduction first, and I can change it, but I, Yeah, I have to.

[00:24:26] Amy: I, that really, I understand. This is like a thing. 

[00:24:31] Blair: And if I’ve got five chapters to write, I’m gonna tell you right now, chapter four cannot be written, my brain can’t go there until one, two, and three are written. So I was a bit stumped on a article a while back. I had gotten to a certain point, and I was like, gosh, I have all these ideas, and now I’m having a hard time putting it together.

So I went to Gemini, just to get ideas, not to have them write it, and then brought those ideas in. A week later, I still didn’t have something that I was satisfied with. I had to scrap the entire thing and start all over again. Because it just, in my brain it’s spaghetti noodles, and I do best when I can find one spaghetti noodle and follow it out.

And what happened to me for chat GBT was like spaghetti noodles was why I couldn’t get it all out and it added more spaghetti. It didn’t help. So Chat GPT, I could see it helping, but I could also see for some thinkers, that it can make it overwhelming.

[00:25:49] Amy: I could see that. No. I think that, we have the advantage of being writers with a lot of experience, and we know even if, if we can’t articulate what we’re trying to say, we know what we’re trying to say, and so we know when it’s not what we’re trying to say.

I think for teenagers sometimes that is a little bit harder, and having, like, like floaties, I think, I think of it as like little floaties, like they’re in the pool and they have little floaties, little, little AI floaties, that can kind of help them, uh, learn how to swim independently. 

[00:26:26] Blair: Let’s, so say you have a student hand something in to you, and you suspect that they have used AI for part or all of it. How are you going to handle it, Amy? 

[00:26:38] Amy: I’m going to say that there is no, like, subtlety when students use AI. You know, it’s like I have never had a student use AI and it not been like so crystal clear, obvious that they used it, particularly in middle school, because it absolutely does not sound like them.

You’ve been reading their writing for years and all of a sudden they’re, they’re sounding like a machine. Well, it’s because it was a machine so I think that it is really important to kind of, first of all, consider the scope of the assignment, right? Was this something that they were trying to do at the last minute just to get something handed in?

Because that is — that feels like less of a big deal. That’s just like kind of doing your homework in the car on the way to school to me — you’re doing a quick, sloppy job and it’s not good, but  — or is it something like where they were insecure about their own work? If I’ve looked at like, several drafts of their work that read like a 6th grader wrote them, like a smart 6th grader wrote them, and then their final draft sounds like a machine. Like there’s a confidence gap there, right? There’s like, they weren’t confident enough in their own writing and their own ideas to use those, to keep building on those, and so they, they cheated expertise and polish and sophistication that they don’t really have, but that is a different kind of problem to work on, right? That is an issue to solve with the student and confidence.

And then sometimes there are students who do it because it’s easy. And, you know, that is, I think what I have the — I don’t want to say the least patience with, because I feel like I’m pretty patient about it, but that is what I have kind of the least sympathy for, because I feel like if you, if you don’t want to engage with an assignment, there’s not a lot that anybody can do to make you want to engage with the assignment.

[00:28:55] Blair: So, would they have been better off not doing the assignment? 

[00:28:59] Amy: So, in the junior high, Suzanne teaches a literature class, and this year, for the first time, she has had students just using ChatGPT left and right to answer basic comprehension questions.

But, they have to write their comprehension questions on a sheet of paper. So, even if they are getting the answers from AI, they are at least writing them in their own handwriting, and so they have to, like, engage with the letters and the words that they’re writing in some way, so for kids who would otherwise not do anything, she feels like that is a plus.

[00:29:36] Blair: Does she let them know that she knows it was written by Chat GPT? 

[00:29:40] Amy: So. The one thing that Suzanne has started doing that I think is so smart is that she tells the kids that she fed the prompts into chat, GPT. She fed the questions into chat GPT, so she knows what the chat GPT answers look like.

And then, but okay, but what does she do? And so when she gets one, she says, wow, this looks just like the answer that chat GPT gave me. You used chat GPT for this. And they’ll say, yeah. I mean, she says she doesn’t give them, the option, right? She doesn’t., I think this is probably very smart. She isn’t like, did you use chat GPT for that?

She’s like, well, you used chat GPT for that. Because if you ask them, sometimes they won’t tell you the truth, not because they’re trying to be deceptive, but because everyone tries to avoid conflict, and especially at that age. You’re not giving them the choice, just saying, yep, this is the, this is the answer that Chat GPT gives, and they will always say yes, and that they got, you know, they thought it had a better answer, they didn’t understand the question, there are many things that they will say.

[00:30:48] Blair: I would guess a lot of people that are dealing with that, and you’ve given some strategies. How would I handle this? The first thing I would do is before it ever happened, at the very beginning, I would sit down and say, hey, this is the situation.

I would say, so answer this question, and you, if you don’t have someone who really likes to write, just write their answer down and then feed the question into Chat GPT.

I would compare the answers, and then I would talk about, you know, kids, almost all of them are gonna look at the Chat GPT and go, it’s so much better! And then when we talk about whether it is better to use your own brain or not. And if you never use your own brain, what’s the downside? And I know that a lot of kids don’t hear you for a while when you do that. But eventually it shows up in their brain, even if they don’t remember you’re the one that said it a million times. And I wouldn’t end there, I would spend a little time there, because what you don’t want, is you don’t want to give someone an assignment, and then have to deal with it in a disciplinary situation. 

[00:32:11] Amy: Right. I think it’s really easy to think that a chat GPT generated paragraph, an AI generated paragraph. better than a paragraph you’ve written. Because it’s fancier.

[00:32:26] Blair: Well, especially if you’re 13. Yeah, I mean because they don’t have a good judge of — they don’t understand you don’t want chat GPT’s answer.

You want 13-year old answers 

[00:32:38] Amy: Well, and it’s like an instagram filter, right? Like the content is what’s really important, the ideas in the paragraph are what are really important And the fancy words and the semi colons, that’s all really cool But it’s the ideas that really matter. And I think a lot of times your ideas might be better than the AI generated ideas, even if your sentences aren’t as polished. 

[00:33:06] Blair: One of the things I really think this gets back to is something I was saying earlier about purposeful. I think we really need to talk to kids about why we want it to be their work because we want to help them grow in the skill set, but it also means you should be really intentional when you’re evaluating work. I always think of the math problems where someone will — you’ll ask your kids if they’re working on certain skills in math.

And the paper ends up with all these red marks because the numbers aren’t perfect . Are you evaluating on handwriting? Because if you are, your students should know. 

I think we sometimes make kids less confident. I think kids don’t understand what we want from their work so that we can give feedback. We want to know exactly where they are because to give something from Chat GPT doesn’t help with the targeted sort of feedback that we want to give that learner to help nurture their growth.

[00:34:27] Amy: Well, it is. I mean, I, several years ago, when I, when we first started homeschooling, I had all these like really complicated thoughts about, well, if there are built in grammar checkers and spell checkers, how important is it to actually learn grammar and spelling — if you can just run a spell check, do you still need to learn how to spell? And I really wanted to take time to sit with this and think about it.

But now I’ve gone through you know, kind of a whole — sudents who have gone through a whole cycle of their learning lives, with grammar checkers and spell checkers, and those things aren’t always effective for them if that’s all they rely on because you can spell something so wrong that your spell checker won’t pick it up.

You can use complex grammar and your grammar checker will say that it’s wrong. And so I think that on some level you do need to have this kind of fundamental basic knowledge of how words are spelled, how sentences are put together, and then, you know, for the AI stuff, how ideas come together into arguments and sentences.

[00:35:42] Blair: Okay, I really like the connection that you just made between AI tools that we’ve used for a long time and are aware of the problems with them. You know, with it. I know I’m pretty sure you know this and I just want to make sure our listeners know too, skills like grammar and spelling are considered to be lower level thinking skills when compared to idea creation. What writing experts will tell you is that you want to teach those because otherwise they get in the way of idea creation and the thinking that needs to happen to write. So, if you’re relying on spellcheck, you still stop if you don’t know how to spell something and it interrupts your flow of thinking even for people who are super experienced writers., 

Do we have any more to add to AI, the discussion about AI? 

[00:36:46] Amy: I think just that this is a conversation that you’re going to keep having with your kids, so you might as well start right now because AI is going to continue to be a force in the world.

It’s not going to go away.You know, it, I think it’s fine if you want to exclude it as an option for your kid right now, but be aware that it is going to be an option that’s out there for them, and you probably want to be the person who introduces it to them so that, like Blair says, you can sit down with them and you can look at it together, and you can look at the stuff it’s good for and the stuff it’s not good for, and you can, you can talk about it together.

That is the great thing about homeschooling.

[00:37:28] Blair: Yeah, and, and just understand, if you’re a person who has really embraced AI, I think it’s important to recognize that there’s a lot of skills that go into writing. There’s a lot of skills that go into synthesizing a question and putting together the facts needed to answer it, and so That is why we need to have kids work on these, work on just that sort of skill building.

There’s a lot of conversation about looking forward — is AI just going to replace human thinking . And so it’s going to become even more essential that we teach our kids how to use AI in a practical, responsible, ethical way, and then how to use it as a piece in the same way we use spell check, but not as the idea creator.

Those things AI isn’t doing. 

[00:38:44] Amy: AI can’t do. People do that. 

[00:38:48] Blair: Yeah, they can, you might never have read the sentence, or the, you know, factoid that AI put out, but it got it somewhere.

[00:39:00] Amy: I definitely think that, it’s exciting, always, to be in a period of big educational change, and I think AI is a period of big educational change.

So, it’s just, you want to prepare —I mean, we want to raise kids who can learn whatever they need to learn for the rest of their lives, and AI is going to be a piece of that going forward. 

[00:39:23] Blair: I do think it’s a mistake to not include it at all, I do, because I think that there are some significant benefits, as Amy highlighted, as Neil Patel said, there’s a lot of things AI can’t do, but it can actually make you more productive if used right. And I think that is true.

I think that if you can use AI, figure out how to use AI to be more productive, but that’s almost an adult thing, isn’t it? Well, actually, when you’re talking about coming up with the thesis, that’s, that would be using it to be more productive. 

[00:40:01] Amy: I think it can be really helpful for, for getting over little humps. And I feel like there are a ton of writing humps., you know, where you’re just kind of stuck and you don’t know what to say next. And you need a, you just need a sentence so that you can keep going because you’re like Blair. You have to write them in the order that the things come. You cannot write paragraph three before paragraph one.

And that’s, that’s totally fair. And so I think AI can be really helpful for kind of easing you over those bumps. I mean, I think that is exactly what it’s a great tool for. Awesome. 

[00:40:35] Blair: Well, if you have any questions, you know where to get us. 

[00:40:38] Amy:, so I guess that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life.