AI & Artificial General Intelligence (Upper-Intermediate Lesson)

ESL/EFL Level: Upper-Intermediate (B2/C1)
Lesson Topics: artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, AI in education, AI in healthcare, copyright
Skill Focus: Speaking, Reading, Vocabulary
Approximate Class Time: 2.25 hours
Lesson Plan Download: artificial-general-intelligence-upper-intermediate-042023.docx
Lesson Overview:

  • After warm-up questions, students read a 400-word passage. The passage introduces AI, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and some of its potential benefits and risks. The passage contains views and quotations from people in the AI field: Sam Altman, Eleizer Yodkowsky, and Geoffrey Hinton. It ends with the recent (March 31, 2023) suggestion that a moratorium be put in place on the development of AI for the sake of public safety.
  • Post-reading activities include comprehension questions and a pair-work activity in which students use vocabulary from the reading to ask each other questions.
  • Afterward, students consider the impacts of AI on several fields and then roleplay two scenarios related to selling AI to a foreign entity and copyright.
  • In the next section, students analyze two paragraphs to try to distinguish which was created by generative AI. This is followed by an activity focusing on the central issues of AI in university education.
  • Next, students discuss (fictional) proposals from an AI-system for improving the healthcare system of a country.
  • All lessons come with warm-up questions, vocabulary questions, and discussion questions.

A greenish image of a robot representing AI

UPPER-INTERMEDIATE (B2/C1) Lesson on Artificial General Intelligence

Warm-up Questions

  1. Do you use any AI software like ChatGPT or Grammarly for your job or personal life?
  2. What does it mean to say that a machine has intelligence?
  3. Are you more excited or worried about the development of AI?

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-- Lesson plan on Artificial Intelligence written by Matthew Barton of EnglishCurrent.com (copyright). Site members may photocopy and edit the file for their classes. Permission is not given to rebrand the lesson, redistribute it on another platform, or sell it as part of commercial course curriculum. For questions, contact the author.

Possible answers to comprehension questions:

  1. …
  2. The passage mentions generative and applied AI. The former is creative, and the latter is used to enhance existing tasks or processes. (It also mentions AGI, which you could say is another form of AI.)
  3. He believes AGI is needed for the next breakthroughs that will enable humans to solve the ‘big issues’ they face today. He likens AI’s capacity to help us move forward to the telescope.
  4. (Alignment is the measure of how similar the system’s goals are to those of its users).
  5. He is trying to show how easily AI could eliminate humanity.
  6. He recognizes that AGI’s promote certain values. Therefore, he wouldn’t want these values being decided by a for-profit capitalist company.
  7. The purpose of the moratorium is to give companies/organizations more time to consider the safety of their products and to ensure that policies are in place to prevent them from harming human civilization.

Vocabulary Answers: 1-d, 2-L, 3-h, 4-a, 5-g, 6-b, 7-i, 8-j, 9-e, 10-k, 11-f, 12-c

 AI in Education: Task 1 Answer: The paragraph on the left is AI-generated. Some distinctions:

  • The left paragraph is more efficient in that it presents more ideas in fewer words.
  • The left paragraph is general, but the right paragraph contains references to specific entities such as Wikipedia or Chat-GPT.
  • The right paragraph has a phrase in parentheses, suggesting the ideas could probably be organized more optimally, but the writer has a (bad?) habit of using parentheses as a personal style.

Collocation answers: 1-b, 2-f, 3-e, 4-d, 5-c, 6-a, 7-g

Endnotes:

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