This past weekend, I attended the American Classical League Summer Institute in Tucson at the University of Arizona. It had been 5 years since I had attended a Summer Institute fully in-person since the pandemic, and at first, I was not sure what to expect. I am so glad that I attended, because 1) there were a lot of very good presentations there and 2) I had forgotten how much I missed my Latin teacher community. (I was also there as one of the recipients of this year's Merens Award).
One of the presentations which I attended was "Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Latin Teachers" by Stefanie Gigante. I have had little to no training on AI in the classroom, and quite honestly, I have been very leery of how it can be used properly. Stefanie gave an example of how ChatGPT can be used to create a lesson plan, and the key is to be as specific as possible with your parameters in terms of what you want. She gave us a bit of time to play around with it during the presentation, so I ended up asking ChatGPT to write me a little story in Latin using some specific vocabulary and grammar forms. It produced a very short paragraph in Latin for me, and I was amazed!
Cut now to being home from the Summer Institute, and today I decided to play around a bit more with ChatGPT in asking it to write me a story with some VERY SPECIFIC parameters:
- Wow, ChatGPT actually produced a story in Latin which makes sense, i.e., it did not create a bunch of gibberish using Latin words. In both versions, there is an actual plot with a beginning, middle, end, conflict, and resolution!
- It took less than 30 seconds for ChatGPT to create a story - I would venture to say around 15-20 seconds!
- For the most part, the grammar is spot on (with a few minor errors in each version).
- ChatGPT basically fulfilled all of my parameters except for the imperfect tense, perfect tense, and gerundive of purpose. I may have to be more specific with my parameters next time or better learn how to get ChatGPT to include that in a story.
- For the purpose of creating a story, ChatGPT did add a lot of words in addition to those which I had requested.
- I do not know to what degree ChatGPT will ever understand the concept of "sheltering vocabulary, not grammar," but I did notice some different grammatical uses of the verbs - maybe it needs more input regarding the concept? Maybe I need to say that each vocabulary word which I list has to be used at least X times in the story?
- I made a spelling mistake in my parameters in asking for "neecsse est" to be used, but ChatGPT "knew" that I was actually asking for "necesse est."
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