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Practice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
A father used ChatGPT to show his autistic daughter how a speech is built
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, a teacher and a parent described students using AI for the structure of their work while doing the writing themselves.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, put a hypothetical to the education panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024. Using ChatGPT at work, he told the panellists, he had found that he could rewrite his emails, save a lot of time and avoid being offensive. He asked whether, had he had that tool at school and had he been diagnosed then, he would have been able to communicate better, and whether anyone had experience or data on that layer of communication, the work of asking what you are trying to say and how to say it better.
The first answer was candid about the evidence. There is no data on it, said a panellist who teaches, but a lot of their students use ChatGPT, and Perplexity, which the panellist said they liked a lot more, to structure their essays. The students take the structure from the tool and then fill it in themselves. The panellist described that as a good use, because it gives a student whose thinking does not run in a straight line a more linear frame that others can follow. The caution came in the same breath. “You have to be careful because they all give false information.” The structure is valuable, the panellist said, and the student then decides what goes in each paragraph.
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Sources the story draws on
- People with Autism Turn to ChatGPT for Advice on Workplace Issues (opens in a new tab), Carnegie Mellon University
- The Australian Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Schools (opens in a new tab), Australian Government Department of Education
- The Australian Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Schools (framework document) (opens in a new tab), Australian Government Department of Education
- Roll out of purpose-built AI education tool to NSW public school students (opens in a new tab), NSW Department of Education
- "I use ChatGPT to humanize my words": Affordances and Risks of ChatGPT to Autistic Users (opens in a new tab), arXiv (preprint, poster)
More from Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
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