If you’re a teacher—primary, secondary, or tertiary—Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and friends are already in your classroom. Maybe they’re there in an official way. Maybe you feel their shadow in the way you’ve had to change your assessment to be AI-proof (or at least AI-resistant), if that’s even possible. Or maybe they’re just present in discussions that your students are having with you and each other about the AI stuff they’re doing outside of class. And you’ll especially feel this if they ask you any questions about how they actually work.

There’s a growing list of “how to use LLMs/GenAI” resources out there, but most of them treat the LLMs as black boxes… e.g. here are some tips on writing a good prompt, or here are some broad questions to discuss about training data and bias. But I’ve looked at a lot of these resources and most of them don’t even try to explain how they work. To some extent that’s understandable—they’re the product of millions of person-hours of R&D and many billions of GPU-hours of number crunching in datacenters worldwide. But there are heaps of other complex machines & systems that we still work hard to explain to students (all the way down to primary level) in age appropriate ways. Why should AI and LLMs be any different?

That’s why I created these LLMs Unplugged resources. Although I’m an academic computer scientist and AI researcher by day, I’ve also got primary-aged kids of my own. And I want them to grow up seeing that these tools aren’t just black-boxes that work by deep voodoo magicl; they’re made by humans and used by humans and can be understood and interrogated as such.

I really do think that any teacher can (with a bit of training) have the confidence to use the LLMs Unplugged resources to show their students how to build their own language model. You might not be able to answer all the tricky questions that come your way afterwards (isn’t that always true!) but you’ll have opened up the AI black box in a way that just memorizing a few prompting tips doesn’t.

If you’d like to find out more about how to use these resources, please get in touch.