New South Wales has begun a six-month trial of a blended generative artificial intelligence app in the state’s public schools, giving students and teachers access to multiple large language models in an educational setting.
From this week, 16 primary and secondary schools will gain access to the app, which has been purpose-built by the NSW Department of Education for school-aged students over the last five months.
The app, dubbed NSW EduChat, uses a blend of large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and GPT-4, to generate responses to questions asked by students that align with the NSW and Australian curriculums.
It has been developed with security in mind, with the inputs and outputs generated private to the department and all data stored in Australia, and aligns with both the Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools and NSW’s AI Assurance Framework.
The app comes a year after NSW banned the use of ChatGPT in schools, joining other state like Victoria and Queensland. Only South Australia, which is also currently trialing a chatbot in schools, opted against a ban.
For students, the app “acts like a virtual tutor”, according to the NSW Education’s head of AI Dan Hart, with a “bucket load of protection and content filtering” to restrict conversations to education topics.
“With Gen AI, the more you pay, the higher quality the answers, and we do not want our students to be disadvantaged further by private school students having access to GPT-4. Our school students may not be able to afford that,” Mr Hart told the Microsoft AI Tour.
“So, when a student asks a question, it passes through a custom classifier that we’ve built… and if it’s about a topic of conversation that we know that ChatGPT doesn’t do very well on, we chuck it to GPT-4 to answer instead.”
A variety of different techniques are used to cleanse both the inputs and outputs from the large language models, including technologies like Microsoft’s Azure AI Content Safety for semantic content filtering.
The app also pre-checks any queries in real-time against a “known list of profanities in 150 languages” – some 250,000 swear words at present – which Mr Hart’s team produced manually late last year.
“It’s not like a web content filtering challenge where you have whitelisted sites and blacklisted sites, because the words change and you really need to be looking at the meaning,” Mr Hart said on Wednesday.
NSW Education also built a “custom model for detecting jailbreaks” to prevent students from manipulating the AI models to bypass protections and generate responses to queries that are outside the app’s intended purpose.
In total, NSW EduChat uses around eight different filters to ensure all the answers being returned to students are suitable, Mr Hart said, but will also monitor conversation during the trial using generative AI to prevent unintended consequences.
“We wouldn’t have been able to… look at this stream of conversations coming through and extracting analysis from it [two years ago], so we’re using Gen AI on top of Gen AI to do that analysis for us,” he said.
Mr Hart said the trial would give the department visibility of what students and staff are using tools like ChatGPT for the first time and help it to understand what generative AI could mean for education.
“We’re really hoping the data we gather over the next six months will help us understand what’s next, what is it good at, what is it not good at, and how can we make it better,” he said.
Of the 16 public schools that will gain “safe, secure and equitable private access” to NSW EduChat over the next two terms, 10 are high schools, four are primary schools, one is a School for Specific Purposes and another is an environmental education centre.
Schools have been given autonomy to use the app where they deem beneficial, with teachers to decide how it is used. Students will also have access to the tool via the NSW Education student portal.
Teachers will receive support from subject matter experts, professional learning and technical resources and a virtual staffroom, the government said in a statement announcing the trial on Wednesday.
“Generative AI is rapidly evolving and offers both challenges and opportunities – and, like many sectors, education is already seeing the impact of new AI tools and practices,” NSW Education minister Prue Car said.
“This trial is an important first step in safely navigating generative AI for use in schools, while upholding safety, security and best practice for our students and teachers.”
