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Critical
                                                   Thinking
                                                   Resource
                                                   Technology

© 2023 Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All rights reserved.

About The Wall Street Journal’s
Critical Thinking Resource
We developed this guide to help you maximize The Wall Street Journal as a resource for
your classes. You’ll be able to energize discussions and engage students with tangible
examples of course concepts that your students can apply in the real world. In addition,
with the help of faculty partners, we’ve curated a special collection of our most popular
and thought-provoking articles about business. For each of these readings, we provide a
summary, correlation to course topics, classroom applications and questions suitable for
launching discussions and conducting assessments.

Here are some of the many ways to incorporate WSJ into your courses:

• COURSE READINGS: Assign articles as required reading alongside your textbook sections.
For best results, include assessment questions on quizzes and exams.
• DISCUSSION LAUNCHERS: Use articles to spur classroom and threaded discussions in online
and hybrid courses on core concepts and current events.
• EXTRA CREDIT: Allow students to read optional articles and answer assessment questions
for extra credit.
• GROUP PROJECTS: WSJ is a rich source of real-world topics for group research and
presentation projects.
• RESEARCH PAPERS AND CASE STUDIES: WSJ features provide timely citations for
research projects.

TA B L E O F CO N T EN T S

1. Professors Turn to ChatGPT to Teach Students a Lesson

2. Can You Flirt Better Than Artificial Intelligence?

3. AI Generated Art for a Comic Book. Human Artists Are Having a Fit.

Professors Turn to ChatGPT
to Teach Students a Lesson
AUTHOR: Douglas Belkin
REVIEWED BY: Maria Marron
DATE: January 25, 2023
TOPICS: Artificial intelligence, AI, Chat GPT, chatbot, college
LINK TO ARTICLE: CLICK HERE

S U M M A RY:
“This is the greatest cheating tool ever invented,” opines a university professor. Artificial
intelligence, specifically ChatGPT, has crashed the gates of academia. We knew something
like this was coming, but maybe not quite so soon and maybe not quite so good. In its first
few weeks of availability to the general public, ChatGPT has been quickly adopted by
thousands of college-level students to “help” construct essays, quiz answers, paper outlines
and more. The threat of students using this technology to literally do their homework, and
turning it in as their own, is palpable.

Some schools and instructors have reacted by quickly instituting revised plagiarism
rules and banning ChatGPT from campus networks. In a hint to a future AI “arms race,”
detection algorithms promise to root out submissions that have the taint of AI sourcing.
But a different philosophy is also in evidence. Ceding that there may be no effective way to
put this technology back into its box, some college faculty are adapting their curriculum to
accommodate for ChatGPT reality and designing new approaches to teaching. Students are
asked to explore the utility and weaknesses of the system, and think about how to improve
its output.

CL A S S RO O M A PPL I C AT I O N :
Though perhaps a little touchy, start the discussion by asking about students’ personal
experiences with ChatGPT. If there is a classroom tool for truly anonymous polling (maybe old-
fashioned pieces of paper with checkboxes for answers?), consider collecting data on the numbers
of students who have actually turned in an assignment that is either wholly or substantially
generated by ChatGPT. How do they feel when ChatGPT gets a good grade for them?

It is so easy to generate amazing ChatGPT output, consider doing live experiments with students.
What kinds of prompts are in ChatGPT’s “sweet spot?” How could those prompts be altered to
make ChatGPT obviously stumble or struggle? Challenge students with the certainty that AI
engines like this will only get better, and that today’s human users are actually contributing
(wittingly or not) to continual improvements in the algorithms. Breakout discussions could explore
the question, “How can we effectively partner with our new AI helper to become more efficient and
productive students and members of society?”

QUESTIONS:
1. Is submitting ChatGPT output as your own work blatant cheating?
2. Should use of ChatGPT be tightly regulated in academic settings? What rules make sense?
3. Should we simply cite ChatGPT as the source of text (as we would in quoting from any human
author) and be done with it?
4. Could we view generative AI like ChatGPT as just another technology that seems scary at first,
but actually isn’t all that big of a deal? How is this any different from electronic calculators
replacing by-hand calculations? Or computer aided design replacing drafting tables?
5. In what educational circumstances might AI relieve us from writing drudgery, allowing us to
operate at a higher level? (An apt analogy might be symbolic math programs like Mathematica,
that allow sophisticated calculus to be done very easily.)
6. Beyond an academic environment, where students are supposed to be learning how to express
themselves with language, what other use cases may be more appropriate for ChatGPT
assistance?
7. Do you think new professions might become available? For example: “Yes, I work as
a human front-end and back-end to an AI authoring tool.” “Yes, I tutor AI systems to
become better writers.”

Can You Flirt Better Than Artificial
Intelligence?
AUTHOR: Sara Ashley O’Brien
REVIEWED BY: Maria Marron
DATE: January 27, 2023
TOPICS: Artificial intelligence, AI, ChatGPT, dating
LINK TO ARTICLE: CLICK HERE

S U M M A RY:
The article may evoke a reaction of “Does artificial intelligence know no bounds as it is
insinuated into our daily lives?” The potential utility of AI-generated “flirting language” is
explored. While much of the search for companionship has moved onto software platforms
like dating apps, arguably the most challenging aspect remains how to open and continue a
comfortable conversation. What should those initial text exchanges be to spur interest and
connection? As in real face-to-face encounters, some people are much better at that than others.
So, a little help (as in the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac) may be welcome.

This is proving to be a challenging application for AI text generators like ChatGPT. Those opening
lines are extremely nuanced forms of human communication, and the AI can quickly go off the
rails. Some users cite the suggestions as “creepy” and bordering on “catfishing” (the deceptive
practice of creating a fictional persona in social networking). Still, AI developers continue to
deploy and test this new communication aid.

CL A S S RO O M A PPL I C AT I O N :
Does it go without saying that all college students have tried meeting people using dating
apps? Tee up the discussion of the controversial topics in the article by getting a “sense of the
room” about experiences with dating apps, focusing on the critical, and perhaps most awkward,
conversation initiation aspects. (Since this may be embarrassing for some students to vocalize,
consider ways to anonymize responses.) Do students agree that it is really difficult to produce
those initial text exchanges on a dating app? Elicit commentary based on the article about
whether AI is a credible approach.

Consider a breakout grouping in which all groups are given the same conversational prompt of
the sort that would happen in a dating app, e.g. “That dog you are holding in your profile picture
is really cute!” Secretly assign some groups to use ChatGPT to generate a response, others to
generate it themselves. Come back together, read each response aloud and have students vote and
discuss whether it was AI or human generated. This is a type of Turing Test experiment. What are
the clues? Do the results sway opinions about this application of artificial intelligence?

QUESTIONS:
1. Is AI-based flirting assistance “a solution in search of a problem?”

2. If a dating app offered this as an option, would you use it? Do you have ethical objections?

3. While apps may broaden the field for sourcing potential dates, how do they compare to face-
   to-face encounters at parties or other social gatherings in establishing an initial true human
   connection? More or less difficult in the online space?

4. If you agreed to meet someone in person after the initial banter in a dating app, how would you
   feel if they ultimately owned up to having used AI to get you interested?

5. Technology has progressed to the point that near-immediate translation can occur between
   different languages, e.g. Italian and English at a restaurant in Rome. Can you imagine a
   scenario in which you would meet a person in a social setting and either secretly or overtly
   rely on AI to help guide you in the conversation? Are we discovering a place where AI is
   simply not welcome?

© 2023 Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All rights reserved.

AI Generated Art for a Comic Book.
Human Artists Are Having a Fit.
AUTHOR: James Hookway
REVIEWED BY: Maria Marron
DATE: January 29, 2023
TOPICS: Artificial intelligence, AI, art, graphics, copyright
LINK TO ARTICLE: CLICK HERE

S U M M A RY:
Conjuring illustrations using artificial intelligence is conjuring controversy as well. Is AI-
generated artwork is just the next step in stretching the creative capacities of humans, or is it
“an insult to life?” Graphic novel author Kris Kashtanova wrote a storyline, but created all the
illustrations using Midjourney, a software platform that translates written prompts—adjectives,
nouns, hints, emotions, places—into illustrations in a requested visual style. In this instance,
the author used an iterative process to refine the service’s output to push the algorithm toward
the desired images. Leaving aside a judgment on the quality of the illustrations, challenging
legal questions arise. Given the machine-based provenance of the artwork, can this graphic
novel be granted a copyright? And who would own those rights, the human “guiding author”
or the AI company? Some human artists believe that their works are being used without
permission to train the AI, and have undertaken legal action.

CL A S S RO O M A PPL I C AT I O N :
Start the discussion, perhaps as pre-work, by calling for students to visit websites of
Midjourney, DALL-E and other similar AI artwork providers. Do they describe a basic
understanding of ownership of the output? Does Midjourney’s description that it is an
“independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative
powers of the human species” allay ownership concerns? Consider doing an in-class experiment
with these platforms. Have students agree on a few descriptive words and submit them; how
does the output compare? Now, replicating the process described by the author, have students
“riff” on the original idea by adding additional descriptive words, or removing and changing
them. In making those adjustments, do they believe they are truly creating artwork?

QUESTIONS:
1. The U.S. Supreme Court has a rather modest requirement to be granted a copyright: the work
   must show only a “modicum of creativity.” Based on the article, has the author surpassed that?

2. As a general matter, should there be a minimum amount of “tuning and adjusting” to be
   considered a modicum of creativity? If you are content with the AI output having entered
   something as simple as “sunset over lake,” should you be awarded a copyright on the image?

3. Do you think of AI-generated images as “art?” Should that word be reserved to apply only to
   work wholly created by humans? Is there anything fundamentally different in how we consider
   AI-generated images as opposed to AI-generated text or music?

4. Should AI companies compensate human illustrators if their work is used to train the
   algorithm? How could the value of the original creation be set, since it is just one of thousands
   of such images?

5. What disclosure rules should be put in place for incorporating AI-generated images in our
   human work? Should authors be required to include, essentially, a “product warning” or
   asterisks to fess up that they didn’t actually create the images themselves?

© 2023 Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All rights reserved.

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