We Shouldn’t Fear ChatGPT in Education — We Need to Work with It
In recent years, the concept of artificial intelligence and machine learning has gained immense traction in the world of education, and OpenAI’s language model ChatGPT is a perfect example of this. While the primary purpose of ChatGPT is to generate texts that sound increasingly human-like, its secondary purpose is to accelerate the field of philosophy, and offer novel ways of assessing a student’s critical thinking skills.
However, not everyone is convinced that ChatGPT should be used in educational assessment. Just like Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (370 BC), where he expresses his worries about the invention of writing and how it will bring forgetfulness, many people today worry that students can use this technology to create essays that are undetectable by traditional plagiarism-detection tools. Even further, René Descartes’ idea of linguistic ability as the difference and distinguishing factor between humans and animals have been further popularized by Alan Turing in his 1950 essay ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. In attempt to find out whether a computer could replicate a human, Turing proposed a test that in our time is popularly known as the Turing Test.
The fear of students using ChatGPT to cheat on their tests is real, although it too can be avoided. Having the students use ChatGPT to answer interesting questions, or even better, a dialogue between a student and ChatGPT can be propositions that are more exciting and less prone to plagiarism. It is important to ensure that these questions require a level of creativity, something which ChatGPT is limited by. Furthermore, the usage of ChatGPT in education needs to be accompanied by explanations of how it works, and the limitations it has.
Recently, the International Baccalaureate announced that they will be allowing its students to use ChatGPT as part of their coursework. To accommodate these changes, professors will have to construct their assignments in a careful and precise manner to reduce the likelihood of cheating with the new technology. As such, the assignments need to be interesting, focusing on the student’s analytical abilities rather than knowledge. A joke I tell my students is that my exams and essays play a similar role to the Turing Test: I can’t know for certain what levels of knowledge a student possesses, but the 2,500 words that they hand in is a bit like an iceberg: a great representation of the student’s understanding that is evident in the quality of their essay.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is a venture capital-funded research laboratory with headquarters in San Francisco, United States. It was founded in late 2015 with the aim of understandings artificial general intelligence and to make the deep learning research publicly available. Their most recent project, ChatGPT, is a research language model that is trained via a few-shot learning approach using dialogues. It is the creators’ goal to make this tool available to developers and small businesses, and eventually promote its usage in educational settings.
Alan Turing was a mathematical genius who is often referred to as the father of modern-day computing. He was a world-renowned computer scientist and is most notable for his contributions to the field of computer science and mathematics, especially with the creation of the Turing machine, a theoretical machine that was the precursor of the modern-day computer. In 1950, Turing wrote an essay named Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he proposed the concept of a Turing Test, which is a test that suggested that if a machine can successfully fool an observer into believing its responses came from a human, then the machine can be said to be intelligent.
In a world where Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly commonplace, it is imperative for us to understand the implications of its usage, as well as its possibilities. ChatGPT offers new possibilities to education, and it is important we take advantage of its capabilities while also understanding its limitations. There is no one-size-fits-all, but with some careful constructions, we can make sure that ChatGPT is used in a way that enhances the student’s educational experience and improves critical thinking.
