I am not very experienced with generative ai but I think it has some major limits that people should know about. I think one of the biggest problems is that it can lull people into believing it, because it often sounds very confident even when it might be wrong. An example of this is in math I have found the answers to be incorrect, yet at first I believed they were right. I also think it is important to mention that generative ai does not understand the world the way humans do. It has no real feelings, common sense, or lived experience. I think this lack of real understanding means it can miss obvious details or misunderstand what someone is asking. I also think GenAI sometimes makes things up, including facts or sources that are not real, and its confident tone can make those mistakes seem believable. I have heard of it making up sources completely. One of the biggest questions I have is does GenAi repeat unfair biases because it learns from human data?. What data is important to it and what is not? I think another limitation is that it may not always know the most recent events, so its answers can be outdated.
I think GenAI can be helpful for learning, but I have also noticed its limits, especially when I think about using it while teaching Social Studies. I think it is great for getting quick explanations or for helping me brainstorm lesson ideas. For example, if I am planning a lesson on the causes of World War I, I think GenAI can break the topic into clear, easy-to-teach points that help me get started. But I also think it can be risky if I am preparing something for students and do not take the time to form that knowledge on my own. It raises the question of whether teachers will know what they are talking about when they are teaching or if their use of AI will dominate? Overall, I think GenAI can support my teaching, especially in Socials by looking up facts, building useful lesson outlines, creating ideas for games, but I still need to use my own judgment and make sure I am guiding students with accurate, thoughtful information.
I also want to mention and share one of the most interesting ai tools I have noticed and that is google notebooklm podcast tool. It allows teachers for example to upload notes and create a podcast from them. This is a great multimodal tool especially for a fun twist on a unit and for those that prefer to learn orally rather than through written text. This is an ai tool that I am interested to explore and I could see its value for teachers and especially in subjects such as english or social studies.