1 research outputs found
Learning to Prompt in the Classroom to Understand AI Limits: A pilot study
Artificial intelligence's progress holds great promise in assisting society
in addressing pressing societal issues. In particular Large Language Models
(LLM) and the derived chatbots, like ChatGPT, have highly improved the natural
language processing capabilities of AI systems allowing them to process an
unprecedented amount of unstructured data. The consequent hype has also
backfired, raising negative sentiment even after novel AI methods' surprising
contributions. One of the causes, but also an important issue per se, is the
rising and misleading feeling of being able to access and process any form of
knowledge to solve problems in any domain with no effort or previous expertise
in AI or problem domain, disregarding current LLMs limits, such as
hallucinations and reasoning limits. Acknowledging AI fallibility is crucial to
address the impact of dogmatic overconfidence in possibly erroneous suggestions
generated by LLMs. At the same time, it can reduce fear and other negative
attitudes toward AI. AI literacy interventions are necessary that allow the
public to understand such LLM limits and learn how to use them in a more
effective manner, i.e. learning to "prompt". With this aim, a pilot educational
intervention was performed in a high school with 30 students. It involved (i)
presenting high-level concepts about intelligence, AI, and LLM, (ii) an initial
naive practice with ChatGPT in a non-trivial task, and finally (iii) applying
currently-accepted prompting strategies. Encouraging preliminary results have
been collected such as students reporting a) high appreciation of the activity,
b) improved quality of the interaction with the LLM during the educational
activity, c) decreased negative sentiments toward AI, d) increased
understanding of limitations and specifically We aim to study factors that
impact AI acceptance and to refine and repeat this activity in more controlled
settings.Comment: Submitted to AIXIA 2023 22nd International Conference of the Italian
Association for Artificial Intelligence 6 - 9 Nov, 2023, Rome, Ital