(bright music) - Aaron Makelky, a social studies teacher from Casper, first heard about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence from one of his students.

Now he uses ChatGPT in teaching and thinks it's a great opportunity for other teachers to do the same.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS, this is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(bright music continues) Welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

We're joined today by Aaron Makelky.

Aaron, you're a Wyoming school teacher.

At what level of school do you teach?

- I teach high school world history at Kelly Walsh in Casper, Wyoming.

- You've discovered fairly recently something that kind of blew you away, and we use the general term AI, artificial intelligence, and you encountered it from a student you told me, who turned you onto to the application of that technology called ChatGPT, which is becoming more and more well known.

And it was a real eye-opener to you as an educator, and now you are giving presentations to other educators about it.

We're here today at the Wyoming TeacherCon25 Conference.

You have an interesting way of introducing the topic related to the kind of training that educators get in some fields.

- The session was called "Be the Teacher AI Can't Replace."

- Right.

- They probably assumed it's gonna be a bunch of AI apps and how to use 'em.

And we started with three questions.

The first was, does your organization have a clear policy and training reviewed at least yearly on fire extinguishers?

- And everybody said, almost everybody said, "Yes."

- Well, it shows I'm not a smart guy.

I thought everybody would stand up, it was most.

My district does, and you have to watch the video and they tell you if it's a grease fire in the kitchen to use this.

And the thinking was, they go like, I thought this was about AI.

And then the next question is, do you have a policy, clear, yearly reviewed, on bloodborne pathogens?

And then everybody stood up.

I can honestly say in my 16 years of public education, I've not had to use a fire extinguisher and I've not been bled on or had any needle stick me.

So maybe I'm lucky, but we do those every year, yet not a single person in the room stood up when I said, "Does your same organization have a policy, clear, yearly reviewed on generative AI?"

And obviously a smart guy like you sat in the front row, like I know where he is going with that, but setting that up to go, oh, that's a good way to put it, we should at least spend as much time on generative AI as we do fire extinguishers in 2025.

- How come?

- Well, I mean, for one, I haven't had to use a fire extinguisher.

Not that that is a, I'm glad we were trained on it because in the event that I needed to, I know which type and how to look for the symbol.

- But AI is being used, even if we don't always realize it.

- And I think that's one of the fundamental problems is people, they don't know what that means.

And a common way, I have this conversation, a colleague once told me, "I don't use AI," to which I responded, "Do you use Netflix?

", "Yep."

"Do you use Spotify or Apple Music?

", "Yep."

"Do you use Google or Apple Maps to navigate?

", "Yep."

"Okay, those all use AI," AI's been around.

- Yeah.

- For almost as long as computers have been, but generative AI, where you're creating an image or a document or a website with it, maybe you don't use that a lot, but that's also being baked into educational tools, things we've used for research, like Google now is using it.

So it's not just, "Hey, write my essay for me."

That's not the only way to use generative AI.

- Two or three years ago when you first were exposed to this, what got you from that moment to training others in the topic?

- Yeah, well, I hope this speaks to something about the kind of educator I am.

A student showed it to me.

I did not have TikTok, they had it on their phone, and they said, "Have you heard of this thing?

It's called ChatGPT."

My first thought was, what a terrible name, like why?

Who picked that name?

- What does that name mean anyway?

That's a good question, what is GPT?

- This is a great way to stump AI people on your training.

You guys can fact check me, but generative pre-trained transformer, in other words, it's tokenizing your input and using statistics essentially to predict the next token.

So the example I give is if I'm on my way home and I text my wife on your iPhone, "Hey honey, want me to stop at the store and grab a gallon of," the predictive text is gonna say, "Milk, orange juice."

I don't know what else, iced coffee, whatever you usually say, well, we've had that technology for a long time.

Now we can do that with a whole paper, or we can do it with pixels in an image.

Google Veo can do it with frames in a video.

So you're just tokenizing or breaking down language into numbers.

And it's what it really is, is statistics.

It's the most purely applied form of statistics I've seen.

- This is what's happened before.

This is probably what he wants, she wants, they want to happen next, so we're gonna try it.

And each time you do it, it gets a little bit more adaptive and intuitive.

- If it has a memory feature like ChatGPT does by default.

- So the difference between this, and my apologies to viewers who already know this, compared to say just looking up something on Wikipedia, is that Wikipedia already has calculated this, so to speak.

And ChatGPT waits for what you ask and then takes it from there.

Is that a fair way to put it?

- Yeah, I mean, I would say Wikipedia, which by the way was a transformative technology.

- Is excellent, yeah.

- Especially for history.

- Yeah.

- The immediate story, I went home from that student's TikTok, it was the end of November, 2022, I think it was just after Thanksgiving break, and the servers kept telling me it was busy, but I was giving it my students' assignments from my world history that week, and it was writing in real time, not a static, hey, this guy wrote an essay, you can download it.

It was like adding details about Napoleon and then making references to rap lyrics from Tupac songs.

And I sat there and I just had this moment that I experienced where I go, that's pretty much been my unique skill on this earth.

They pay me, I get health insurance, pretty good health insurance to teach kids how to write like this.

And now there's a tool that's free on their phone.

How is that gonna change education?

And Wikipedia is static.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for Riverton, Wyoming.

- Here we go.

- And I look tomorrow, we see the same thing.

- Yeah.

- If you go to ChatGPT and say, "Write me a short one page overview of what Riverton is like," and there's a memory feature that knows you are into broadcasting and media and the outdoors, you like the mountain bike, you're gonna get a different answer than if I go to the same site, "Give me a one page overview of Riverton, Wyoming," but I'm a teacher and I fly fish, and I used to coach football.

Well, your answer didn't get that because it's generating, that's what makes it generative.

It's creating an output for you that's dynamic.

Wikipedia is the same, and if it gets changed for you, the whole world will see it differently, so it's static.

- You teach history, so the broad generalized term for you would be maybe a humanities kind of person.

You're not, but this is a, what we might, again, in the world of education, call a STEM sort of a topic, but it really clicked with you, more humanities people might ought have take your example, huh?

- Well, the thing I tell people is, "Do you trust the engineers and technology and computer scientists to get it right?"

They're very good at what they do.

And I don't understand, admittedly the vast majority of it, but it's gonna be in a classroom, in a government agency, in the legislature, in people's employment.

Do you trust the tech person who knows the ones and zeros on how to apply it and build it?

Because that's no different than any other tool in human history.

There's gotta be people that go, "But what do we do with it?"

- Sure.

- And just as importantly, what do we not do with it?

- Yeah, and you're probably young enough, this didn't happen with you, but I was in maybe the seventh grade, and that's when students first started getting handheld pocket calculators as they were called.

And they were absolutely forbidden in school.

And if you were caught using it, you were in trouble and the teacher would confiscate it.

And if they realized you were using it, you'd have to come to the chalkboard and try to do your work there.

But within three or four years, maybe by the time I was in high school, that wasn't true anymore.

By the time I was in college, they were required.

- [Aaron] Yep.

- And today, the concept that, the idea, the notion that you'd go to a math class and not use a calculator is just ridiculous.

I mean, it's incomprehensible, really.

And you talked about tools throughout history.

I wonder how much hand wringing there was when the first ancient human used a hammer instead of a rock.

Maybe there was some then.

- Well, the first ancient Mesopotamian that saw a guy pull a cart with wheels called you a cheater.

- [Steve] Yeah, yeah.

- I call 'em smart.

- Yeah, and so there is a lot of hand ringing going on with this now, I don't see that you are one of those.

Are you afraid of the technology in a way that some people seem to be?

- I'm afraid of where it will lead if people don't get involved in shaping it.

I think a lot of people run from that.

I'm weird in a lot of ways.

I went back to my classroom in January, a new semester started and I said, "Hey kids, welcome to world history.

This is what we do."

And every time they had an assignment, a quiz, a paper, a discussion, I did it on the screen in front of them with ChatGPT, and the first.

- And they knew what you were doing?

- They didn't know what it was.

And here's part of my tactic, you know this 'cause you always think ahead on my hooks and my presentation, Steve, is I wanted them to ask, "What are you doing?

You didn't type that, that's not Google Docs.

What is that?"

And at first I noticed it wasn't giving a very good output.

It wasn't detailed, it wasn't nuance.

It looked good to someone who wasn't a historian.

But then I realized, wait, that's like a carpenter saying, "This hammer can't build a good house."

Maybe I don't have the skill to use it.

So I'm glad I forced myself, by the end of the semester, I had written, I don't know, 30 essays and taken a bunch of quizzes with only ChatGPT, and I got really good at it.

And people go, "How do you get good at it?"

I gave it instructions like I would a human.

- Right.

- And then at the end, students would say, "Well, are we gonna get to use that?

Is that gonna be part of the classroom?

Are we gonna go to college and have that, and?"

- Key question.

- That's where I said, I don't know what other teachers will do.

But now that I've seen what it can, I don't think the problem was the tool, I think it was the user.

And just, there's no guidebook, there's no instructions with AI.

So you gotta figure it out.

There's one thing I've learned in my experience in getting to meet some of the people who build these tools and run these companies, they have no idea how the tool will be used.

We have this illusion that the Sam Altmans and the CEOs of Google, they know what we're gonna do in a classroom or a office space with these technologies, they don't, just like the guy who made the hammer does not know what kind of house you will build versus me with the same tool.

So it's really just the point of I wanna help shape it.

- And figuring it out probably doesn't include forbidding it, trying to forbid it, slow it down because that train left the station and is picking up speed.

And the time to have done that would've been a long time ago, and why?

As you pointed out, through history, we do things to make our lives better, easier, quicker, more productive.

- And I can say this as an educator who spent a lot of time and money learning facts pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia, I can argue that that's amazing that I know all these things and I can beat you in a trivia contest, but ultimately it's a futile argument to win.

- Yeah, I'm with you on that.

I never lost a game of "Trivial Pursuit," speaking of an old reference that most people don't know anymore.

But now people see me and say, "So what, why?

I can beat you in 'Trivial Pursuit' just like that."

And it's hard to argue.

It's personally sort of hurts my feelings, I guess.

And I hear you kind of saying that too.

- Yeah, and I love the history analogy.

So I'll give you another one that's maybe, 'cause people go, "Oh, if it's teachers today, you're calling 'em out if they're hesitant to adopt it."

I'm not, let's call out archers.

- Okay.

- Let's go back almost 1,000 years ago, and you're an archery your whole life who trained in the art of archery.

You have some six foot long British long bow, you can shoot it 100 yards.

I show up with a crossbow, I point it, I click, my bolt can penetrate armor, it's a better weapon than yours, and it takes almost no skill.

How would you feel as an archer who's trained your whole life?

That I'm the cheater, I didn't grind in college and get a degree in it or practice for thousands of hours?

And I go, "Well, let's go in a battle, Steve.

Which one do you want, which one do you want on your side?"

And the whole, well, I studied this my whole life.

It used to be a really important skill to know facts in history.

You're right, it was, but it's not anymore.

That doesn't mean they're irrelevant, it means that can't be the only thing.

And if you're the archer that doesn't wanna pick up the crossbow, I don't wanna fight in your army.

- And there's the fine line between a teaching aid and a teaching crutch and maybe a teaching replacement.

My wife's a public school teacher, my son's a university professor.

There's the fine line between the learning aide and the cheating aide.

How do we keep from crossing the line, or do we?

Or I guess this is the challenge that you're talking about.

We still get to perform some small function, I guess, right?

- Yeah, and school's not going away.

One of the benefits I think to school teachers is our systems have been slow to adopt.

Maybe that means as we start to, we'll have a little bit of extra data and experience before we maybe make a policy or decide what tools to use.

However, one of the things I tell people is if students only see this work as a box to check, there have been ways.

I went to high school with a student who took note cards, stapled 'em inside out under her shirt and would cheat on physics tests.

We didn't ban index cards, 'cause by the way, you can't ban those.

You can try, but some kid sneaks it in.

The best way is obviously to encourage the kids to value the learning, but that can be a little bit naive.

- To counter the fear that, well, teachers are just gonna be replaced by this 'cause it will be better than the teachers, the teachers then, there's an opportunity for the teachers to be better.

- Yeah.

- I joked with you a little bit off camera that how many people profess to be experts on education?

Everybody's an expert.

I went to school, my kid went to school, therefore I know all about it.

Well, now we're entering an area where it's harder and harder to claim that, especially the way you're talking about what the future of education could be.

It's training people to use this incredible tool that is gonna be part of their work life, their home life, and then everything else, or it can.

And so here's where the teachers need to actually step up, not retreat, fair?

- Well, let's use your calculator analogy.

Rather than say it's like calculators, we ban 'em and then we required 'em, did that allow teachers to not have to keep a paper, pencil grade book to add your scores?

Would you trust your teacher to add the scores or the calculator?

As a teacher, that doesn't mean I don't need math.

It means I don't need to spend time every day keeping a hard copy grade book.

I trust my calculator to do that.

Instead of saying it's taking away my value, it's taking away friction from things maybe I don't need to be the expert.

And you can view that as liberating rather than condemning you to a life of robot servitude or whatever dystopian view that some people have.

Which by the way, by banning these things and refusing to use them, you're setting yourself up ironically for the future you don't want to inherit.

- Interesting, we can't predict the future.

We can try, but so try.

- Yeah.

- Because this is still so new, and that's the thing, gosh, some people say, "Well, it got this wrong, ChatGPT's so smart, but it didn't know that John Elway did this instead of this."

Well, okay, it does now, and five, 10, 50 years from now, boy, can we imagine what it might be then?

I dunno.

- And if those people saw even today what it already can do that they're not aware of, they would change their tune.

I got a lot of, "ChatGPT can't count the R'S in strawberry," and my favorite response to that is, "Do you know how to prompt it to get the right answer?"

- Yeah.

- [Aaron] I'll teach you.

- Give it a minute, yeah.

- But you not knowing how to use it and blaming the tool is like me saying, "Look at this house, it's terrible.

This hammer doesn't work."

I've never welded before.

If I blame the welding torch my first day in the welding shop, we'd laugh and say, "You haven't put in the time.

You don't have the skill to wield the tool."

- Yeah, you talked about how to be the teacher AI can't replace.

I was a college trustee, and I know from that experience, if there's a way to make education work pretty well that costs a little bit less money, the people that run education are gonna want to do that or they're gonna be highly interested.

And the same goes for any other occupation I think.

- What I would tell people when they ask, Steve, is in the immediate sense, if you're the one not learning the tool, you'll be the first on the list to be replaced.

If I, as a history teacher, paper, pencil, let's take a quiz on names and dates, and my principal goes, "That's all you do?

We got Google and Wikipedia, buddy.

Why am I paying you your salary?"

- [Steve] Yeah.

- That's one, but one of the fears that I do have is people can create artificial shortages, whether it's highly qualified teachers in a subject area, like special education, music, art, science.

And then say, "Oh, we don't have any teachers to do that.

Here's a cheaper way because there's no certified human Wyoming special education teacher."

- Circle feeds on itself.

- Let's automate that one.

And it can be intentional.

And people, you're right, they can set that self-fulfilling prophecy up and go, "Oh, I guess we have to get rid of that funding in those jobs 'cause we can't find the people."

That is a fear that I have.

And I do think education is unique from the business world, we don't produce widgets.

I know the taxpayer in a way is an investor or maybe a stakeholder in our company, so to speak.

But you can't just say the ROI on the school funding was this this year based on sales and our budget, we're producing citizens.

And the test I give kids all the time as a social studies teacher is what I want you to vote in my precinct, to know you're informed.

You would serve in the jury pool for a family member.

Like, oh, you're lucky to have him.

I had him in government class and he knows his stuff.

That's how you really measure the output of education, and also preparing kids to learn in a future that's never been more uncertain.

How are we preparing kids in kindergarten right now for jobs they'll have in 13 years when they graduate?

No one has a clue what jobs those will be.

Guys my age are running Twitter accounts making more money than me.

They just tweet from their couch every day.

I didn't see that as a class when I went to college.

But they knew how to learn a new skill and apply it.

And education has to be focused on that.

- You told us you're a small town guy.

- I am.

- Your degree is in what?

- I have a bachelor's in Social Studies Education from Montana State University in Bozeman, go Bobcats.

And I have a master's in educational leadership.

K-12 principal endorsement from the University of Wyoming where we're sitting today.

- And you've lived in Wyoming how long?

- This is year 15, I believe.

- The reason I'm asking is you're not an MIT computer scientist.

There's a need for expertise and thoughtful application of this everywhere, including in social studies majors in Wyoming and teachers.

- Yeah, well, and that's what's cool.

Who's the expert at using AI in the classroom, true expert that has decades of experience and has a degree?

Nobody.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- Most people didn't know what that was.

I didn't know what it was until three years ago.

Well, it's a little different.

If you wanna be an expert farrier and fit horseshoes, it takes a lot of time, and there's a bunch of people that are great at it.

That's not the case in most verticals with generative AI.

It's just, I don't know, I was the first person to do it and someone my website or listened to my talk or watched my YouTube video and now they ask me how to do it.

- That was my next question.

What's the response to it been?

You're busier doing this kind of thing than you used to be, I take it.

- I mean, it's mixed.

If you're talking about some of my colleagues in the school setting, I get a lot of pushback.

The teachers who use writing, so usually social studies and English, have had this illusion that it's impossible to cheat on an essay until ChatGPT came out.

And that the only way students can use it is to write papers in their class.

And an example I'll get a lot of times from a colleague who I have great respect for, but they don't understand the tool, they go, "Well, you just let kids use AI on everything."

We can teach kids how to use these things without saying, "Go crazy, use it in any way you want."

Just like a calculator, there are math sections the teacher said, "You need a calculator.

You can use one, you will not use one."

There's a little bit of nuance there.

What I'll tell teachers is if you think you can ban it or keep it out of your classroom, you're delusional.

And ask your kids, "Be honest, how have you found ways to cheat?"

And they'll tell you story after story after story.

And I hear those too because they know that I'm a little more pragmatic or realistic with those things.

And here's an example I told an English teacher.

She said, "I have students write paper, pencil in my classroom, their phone is put up in this phone caddy on the wall."

I shared a student with that colleague.

So say he was writing essays in your class, and then came to my history later in the day.

And he said, "Just so you know, I read the classwork," let's say it was on a Monday, "I took pictures of it with my phone.

I went home, I had ChatGPT write my essay for me.

I hand wrote it on paper with a pencil.

I came to class the next day, put my phone up, I didn't have a computer."

She goes, 'Okay, get out a piece of paper and a pencil.

Write your essay.'

She walks down that aisle and isn't looking.

I just trade papers from my backpack to my desk and go, 'Here's my handwritten essay.'"

The teacher goes home, it's an AI proof learning environment.

No, it's not, and you don't control what's on their phone, and you don't control what they use outside of school.

You can't.

- You can't.

How do you as an educator then decide that a student deserves an A in something?

How do we evaluate someone who we know can do this, whether we're giving 'em permission to or not?

- Yeah, well, I had this thought last night, Steve.

I was fishing in a pond with my sons, who are 11 and eight.

And in the world they grow up in, they can go to ChatGPT or a plethora of other free sites and say, "Teach me how to catch a fish."

And it'll write a great two-page response on how to catch a fish.

Last time I checked, ChatGPT hasn't caught any fish.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And reading it didn't make you a better fisherman.

Now, if you didn't know the first thing about fishing, that was probably helpful.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- But you get to a point where you say, this abstract paper about the thing isn't actually learning.

It's ideating, and that's great, we have to do that in school.

But that can't be all that we do.

And if my kid came home and said, "I'm an expert at fishing," and I said, "How?"

"Well, I read this ChatGPT article," we would laugh.

But a lot of education has turned into, well, it can write my paper, it can pass my quiz, and that's always been the standard.

- I must be educated then.

- Yeah, I know all the stuff on your checklist.

Check, check, check, gimme my A. Well, one, that reveals the transactional nature of a lot of educational experiences.

I want the grade, the credit, the diploma.

- That's another show.

- That's another show.

You'll find better people to talk on that one.

But then what the teacher is faced with, it's the same thing as history teachers when Google showed up, knowing facts can't be all that we do.

I'm not saying kids don't need math 'cause we have calculators.

I'm saying now they can do cooler things with the math they learned when we give them a calculator.

AI doesn't replace evaluating sources and knowing names, dates and facts.

And in fact, it makes it more valuable because people are more skeptical than ever of digital sources, even video and images.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- But it allows us to build on the abstract, I wrote a paper about a thing.

Well, what did you do?

What product can you create besides words on a page?

Because those are ubiquitous.

And we know this in a capitalist system.

If something is abundant, it's cheap.

History facts, they were a lot more expensive when I paid for a history degree almost 20 years ago.

Pretty cheap now, no one pays me to know dates.

Well, AI is starting to do that with other fields that have been isolated from that effect.

And it seems weird, but that's why I think history teachers who've gone through the shift of Google and Wikipedia and Web 2.0, they're ones that are equipped to help us navigate the future with AI.

- I'm sure I could have input my topic ideas to ChatGPT for our interview and it would've come up with better questions than I asked, or at least as good and with less stammering.

But I'm enjoying having this conversation.

I hope that in the future, that continues to be a value that human beings have.

- I see that being more valuable than ever.

- Yeah.

- Education is starting to figure this out.

It can't just be the transactional, factual exchange, my brain has stuff, now your brain has been bestowed with those 'cause I'm the almighty teacher and professor, go forth and get your degree.

It has to be something more than that.

- I really enjoyed talking to you about this, and thank you for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- Yeah, thank you for having me, Steve.

I really appreciate it.

- Thanks.

(bright music)