How to avoid Workslop: a Teacher’s Guide to Intentional AI

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

AI is one of the most effective new tools to save time in your workplace.

Over the past year, in my full-time job as a Head of History, I’ve leveraged AI to produce a bank of high-quality resources that can be deployed while a member of my department is off, to ensure that students continue to receive the same level of high-quality education without compromising my colleagues’ needs to rest while under the weather.

I’ve also seen the opposite when it comes to AI. I’ve seen examples online of low-level resources generated without a second thought. I’ve seen AI-generated emails responded to with AI-generated responses. The human touch is gone. All that’s left is what the internet has started calling ‘slop’: low-effort produce.

We need to avoid this at all costs. The alternative means handing over all of our tools to schools that are run entirely by machines. While that sounds great for your workload, the impact on our students could be generational.

I’m lucky to have been included on our school’s ‘AI Trailblazer’ programme, where digital-first teachers were given the opportunity to trial the highest level of Gemini AI firsthand. Consequently, we’ve developed a really robust set of guidelines that dictate how AI should be used.

Sadly, not every school will have had the scope or time to do this yet. It’s up to us to make sure that we’re using this new technology to enhance our jobs, rather than replace them.

I’ve written the below guide to advise on how we do this in secondary schools, with actionable steps to take along the way.

Use your expertise

It is so tempting to run a question through AI and take it for its word. There’s a distinct warning on all of the big names in AI, something about how it can hallucinate and generate incorrect responses. If the machine is warning you that it might not always be accurate, you might want to take heed.

Action: Anything that you produce must be checked before you use it. We are the experts; we have gone through so many years of training and education, so it’s essential that we use our expertise to make sure that what we’re creating is accurate.

Keep the human touch

I’m really passionate about leveraging AI to cut down our workloads. It might be one way that we handle this retention crisis and keep more teachers in work – by helping to manage their wellbeing. However, I’m equally passionate about keeping AI out of the creative sphere. We use this new technology to give us more time to do the things that we want to do, rather than to replace the human touch.

While teaching might not feel like an inherently creative outlet, the same principles apply: if you’re using AI to write content, do so to outline only.

Action: Rather than getting the machine to generate an email response, ask it to outline the original email’s key points, before outlining a bullet-pointed response. Then, using your brain, turn those bullet points into prose. Anything lesser will feel like drivel to your reader, washing out the importance of the message. 

An editor, not a creator

In the past, I’ve experimented with using AI to write my blog posts. I think that there were two that I asked ChatGPT, back when it first came to prominence, to write entirely, with only a few edits from me.

But I thought, what’s the point in having a blog if I’m asking something to write it for me? Now, I exclusively use it as an editor and as a way to explore ideas. If I have writers’ block, I’ll ask it to generate a list of ten ideas according to my niche. If I want to work on growing my online presence, I’ll ask it to research how other writers are popularising themselves and what they’re writing, taking inspiration from them. Almost as if there’s a whole team of people on my side, plugging the gap that full-time bloggers might hire somebody for.

The point is, Gemini is like a companion – an editor – it’s not a creator.

Action: Not sure whether your email to a parent strikes the right tone? Ask AI to check it over. Keep whatever your company’s preferred Artificial Intelligence is in front of you while getting your admin sorted and keep the creativity to the humans.

A word of warning on Workslop

Workslop is one thing – low-quality resources produced by AI without human input does no favours to anyone involved. Even worse than Workslop is using AI when it’s not necessary. At this point, it’s not just a pedagogical waste, but also a resource waste; a literal waste of energy.

I’ve heard of people performing Google searches on Gemini. While this is hard to avoid, due to its automatically-produced AI summaries, it’s not hard to avoid typing this directly into Gemini, which could lead to a whole host of AI-powered searches.

Why is this so bad?

AI is a massive consumer of electricity and water. It’s not going away anytime soon, so we should absolutely learn how to use it best, but please just ensure that your use of it considers the environmental impact. Consider: is what I’m about to use AI for a good use of the environment?

If not, don’t do it.

I’ve written a whole host of other articles on Artificial Intelligence that you can delve into now:

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