I presented last week at Clover Park Technical College’s AI Institute. I used to talk about education technologies, ideas, and processes as often incomplete and misunderstood through the insistence of seeing the new technology and trying to cludge it into the old way of doing or seeing things. I used the analogy of the four-legged chicken from some students I over-heard discussing whether or not chickens had four legs because you apparently got four legs in a bucket of chicken. I wanted to update the problem of not having enough information, or not understanding how the parts are related to the whole, to make an effective evaluation of new technology.
Since it was the AI Institute, I wanted ChatGPT to make a picture of a four-legged chicken. I went back and fourth with it asking for a four-legged chicken and kept getting any number of legs but four. This is typical of what it produced:
I asked it why the chicken had seven legs instead of four, and it said “It seems the image generation process has misunderstood the request again, resulting in an incorrect number of legs. This could be due to the complexity of the task, as generating an animal with an unusual number of limbs can sometimes lead to unpredictable results.
I’ll make another attempt to create an image with exactly four legs, making sure to emphasize that specific detail. Let me try once more.“
I was totally befuddled with why it just couldn’t produce a four-legged chicken. I mentioned it in my presentation as something that AI didn’t seem capable of doing and Meagan Sanders, who also presented at the AI Institute, casually sent me a picture of a chicken with four legs: 
So I asked myself “Why can she get a chicken with four legs and I can’t?” And then it struck me, in working with ESL students, constructions (and pronunciation) of phrases like “two-legged” were sometimes problematic. Maybe ChatGPT has the same problem. I then asked it for a “chicken with four legs” and got this:
I have not been able to consistently reproduce this as an experiment. With “four-legged humans” I often get what looks like two figures super-imposed on one another giving me a human with four legs and four arms.
I think all of this points out two things: 1) I am spending too much time on four-legged chickens. 2) We are not yet ready to trust AI with the nuclear codes.
