Class 9 · Unit 4: Generative AI · Lesson 4.5 · 40 min
Benefits, limits and ethics
Thirty seconds, a perfect seating plan — and forty children's names now on a company's servers.
Today you will: Pair every benefit with its limit · Name four risks, and who causes each · Write class rules a teacher could check
Story
The seating plan is due by lunch, and Nusrat has a good idea. She opens the school account, pastes in the whole class list — forty names, with who must sit at the front because they cannot see the board, and two notes about who must not sit together — and asks for a seating plan.
It works beautifully. Thirty seconds, a neat table, every condition met.
Her teacher goes quiet, then asks: "Where are those forty names now?"
Nusrat does not know. Nobody in the room knows. The names of forty children, two of them with a medical reason attached, are now on a company's servers somewhere, in a message she cannot recall, under terms nobody in the class has read.
The tool did exactly what she asked. The problem was never the answer. It was what she put in to get it.
Watch
What you gain, and what it costs — — scan code 9.4.5 in the printed book.
Warm up your fingers
Skill: typing a list fast, Term 2 (5 min)
- On typing.com, open the numbered-list or short-lines practice your teacher has set .
- Target: 35–40 WPM at 94%+.
- You are about to draft rules as short numbered lines, so practise exactly that shape.
On the laptop
You need: LibreOffice Calc and Writer · risk-cards.ods · class-rules.odt
Mission 1: Benefits and their limits (5 min, in pairs)
- ☐1
Sheet Benefits: beside each of five benefits, write the limit that comes with it — the one that arrives because of that benefit.
Mission 2: Classify the cases (7 min)
- ☐2
Sheet Cases: eight situations, including Nusrat's seating plan. For each: which risk (hallucination · bias · privacy leakage · over-reliance) · who is harmed · what would have prevented it.
- ☐3
Predict: which risk will turn up most? Two cases carry more than one — mark both and say which is worse.
Mission 3: The class rule set (5 min, whole class)
- ☐4
Each pair proposes one rule in one line, in
class-rules.odt. - ☐5
Keep only rules that pass: could a teacher tell tomorrow whether it was followed? Agree six to eight, each saying what to do. Print it for October's project work.
Stuck?
Ask: was the problem in what went IN, or what came OUT? In → privacy leakage. Out → hallucination or bias. Neither → over-reliance.
Finished early?
Write the rule that will be hardest for this class to keep, and one change to how work is set that would make it easier.
No laptop today?
Read the eight cases from the handout; classify them in notebooks. Vote on the rules at the board and copy the agreed set for the noticeboard.
Now you know
- Every benefit arrives with its own limit:
| Benefit | The limit attached to it |
|---|---|
| A first draft in seconds | Confident details that were never true |
| An explanation whenever you're stuck | Nobody checked that explanation |
| Translation between languages | Weakest in the languages closest to us |
| Help for someone who finds writing hard | Your own voice disappears if you let it |
| Code a beginner couldn't write yet | Code you can't fix when it breaks |
- Privacy leakage is the risk students cause themselves. Under the DPDP Act, anyone under 18 is a child whose data needs extra protection. A free tool is usually paid for with data.
- Bias: the model learned mostly about other places, in other languages. Ask whose version of your valley you're being handed.
- A good rule can be checked. "Be responsible" can't. "Nothing about another person in any prompt" can.
Debate it
Nusrat's seating plan was genuinely better than the one the teacher would have made by hand, and it took thirty seconds.
Write the rule that would have let her keep the benefit without sending forty children's names anywhere. Then say what it costs her.
Check yourself — practice, not a test
1. Match each benefit to the limit that comes with it:
A first draft in seconds · An explanation whenever you are stuck · Code a beginner could not write · Translation between languages
Match with: confident details that were never true · code you cannot debug · nobody checked that explanation · weakest in our own languages2. Pasting a class list with medical notes into a chatbot is mainly:
- ○ Hallucination
- ○ Bias
- ○ Privacy leakage
- ○ Over-reliance
3. Under India's DPDP Act, a 14-year-old counts as a child whose data has extra protection.
- ○ True
- ○ False
4. A free tool is usually paid for with ______.
5. Which classroom rule is actually checkable?
- ○ "Use AI responsibly."
- ○ "Be careful with AI."
- ○ "No names, photographs, numbers or addresses in any prompt."
- ○ "Do not over-use AI."
Remember
Name the benefit and its limit together. And nothing about another person ever goes in.