VERSION A · LYCÉE GÉNÉRAL · Première: B1+ towards B2 · Terminale: B2 (LVA) · documents reaching towards C1
Session 1: What is AI really?
Part 1. What can AI do today, and what still belongs to science fiction?
Objectives
- Define narrow AI and general AI
- Use can / cannot / could to express ability and possibility
- Sort myths and realities about AI
Warm-up
Students look at three pictures: a voice assistant, a chess board, the robot Baymax. In pairs: which one is real AI today, which one is fiction? Why?
Documents
Document 1: Landmarks in AI.
- 1950: Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence and asks "Can machines think?"
- 1997: IBM's Deep Blue beats world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
- 2016: DeepMind's AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol at the game of Go, four games to one, in Seoul.
- 2022: OpenAI releases ChatGPT to the public.
All these systems are narrow AI: they are excellent at one task. No machine today has general intelligence or consciousness.
Easy to find on YouTube: "AlphaGo: The Movie", full documentary, Google DeepMind official channel.
Activities
- Myth or reality? Students sort ten statements (AI can drive a taxi in some cities / AI can feel love / AI can write an essay / AI can make mistakes...) and justify.
- Grammar focus: AI can recognise faces. AI cannot feel emotions. One day, AI could ...
- Pronunciation: stress in arTIficial, inTELligence, alGOrithm, TECHnology.
- Mind map of AI vocabulary: brain, mind, job, risk, data, algorithm.
Sentence starters
- I think this is real because...
- This belongs to science fiction since...
- Today, AI can... but it cannot...
- In the future, AI could...
- What surprises me is that...
Role play
Pairs: Student A is a journalist, Student B is an AI researcher. The journalist asks three questions about what AI can and cannot do. The researcher answers with can / cannot / could.
Gap-fill worksheet
Word bank: narrow, general, beat, champion, data, algorithm, consciousness, released
- In 1997, Deep Blue managed to ______ Garry Kasparov at chess.
- AlphaGo became a ______ at the game of Go in 2016.
- ChatGPT was ______ to the public in 2022.
- Today's AI is ______ AI: it is good at one task only.
- A machine with ______ intelligence could do any task like a human.
- An ______ is a set of instructions a computer follows.
- AI learns from huge amounts of ______.
- No machine has ______: it is not aware of itself.
Answer key
- beat
- champion
- released
- narrow
- general
- algorithm
- data
- consciousness
Homework
Find one example of AI you use or see in daily life (a translator, a map app, a recommendation) and write five sentences: what it can do, what it cannot do.
Assessment grid
| Criteria | Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Few AI words | Some AI words | Varied AI words | Precise, varied vocabulary |
| Modals can / could | Rarely correct | Often correct | Mostly correct | Always correct and varied |
| Myths vs realities | No justification | One reason | Clear reasons | Clear reasons with examples |