Which AIs can I use for teaching?
Tufts has vetted and licensed several AIs which can be used by instructors and students for teaching and learning:
All-Purpose AI
- Copilot by Microsoft, powered by GPT-4, for generating text, images, and code, summarizing documents, etc. Free with Tufts Microsoft account.
Image AI
- Firefly by Adobe, for generating high-quality images. Free for faculty and staff via Tufts Adobe Creative Cloud. Available to students for a per-semester fee.
Zoom's AI
- Zoom AI Companion can summarize meeting transcripts. Free with Tufts Zoom account. Can be enabled in the Zoom meeting settings.
Offline AI
- Jan.ai is a Tufts-approved open source AI that runs locally on your machine (i.e. completely offline).
Although Turn-It-In and other vendors offer so-called "AI-detection" tools, we have not yet found one that we can recommend. These are our reasons for concern:
- In our extensive testing we found the current AI-detection tools to be inaccurate, producing a high percentage of false positives (flagging human-written content as AI) and false negatives (failing to detect AI content).
- Of particular concern is that AI-detection tools are more likely to falsely flag text written by neurodiverse students and students for whom English is a second language.
- Students can use newly available "AI humanizing tools" to make AI-generated content seem like it was written by a human.
Since AI-detection is unreliable you may have to adapt your assessments so that you can evaluate students' work differently.
IMPORTANT NOTE: AIs are new and experimental technology. Even AIs which claim to be secure may have security vulnerabilities which have not yet been discovered or addressed.
Before you use AI for teaching read: Tufts Guidelines for Use of Generative AI Tools
For support using any of these tools for teaching and learning contact [email protected]