Is ChatGPT the Future of Cheating or the Future of Teaching?
Some Experts Argue that the Chatbot Can be a Beneficial Educational Tool.
Teachers and Schools are Being Forced to Adapt to Students Using AI Chatbot ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, the cutting-edge chatbot from OpenAI that was released in November 2022, can solve math equations, write a history term paper, compose a sonnet and almost everything in between. So it’s not surprising that many educators support banning the chatbot in schools to prevent plagiarism, cheating and just plain inaccuracy.
In response to these concerns, some major districts have banned the chatbot in schools. In December, the Los Angeles Unified School District “preemptively” blocked access to ChatGPT while “a risk/benefit assessment is conducted,” a district spokesperson told the Washington Post. And in January, New York City Public Schools banned access to ChatGPT from devices and networks that the school owns, per the Washington Post. A spokesperson for the NYC Department of Education told Chalkbeat that the decision was made “due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”
But not everyone is on board with a complete ban. Some educators say instead of banning it, teach kids how to use it smartly and fairly, and it could be a beneficial educational tool.
The One Thing That Experts Do Agree Upon. You Cannot Ignore It.
“ChatGPT is just one more piece in the puzzle that’s accelerating change in terms of teaching and education,” said Trevor MacKenzie, an English teacher in Victoria, Canada.
The Biggest Issue with ChatGPT: Cheating and Plagiarizing
ChatGPT is the leading edge of a new wave of chatbots based on so-called generative language models. They are trained on large sample sets of writing, and their writing is much more structurally complex than previous generations of bots.
The chatbot is so good at creating human-like responses that Alex Lawrence, professor at Weber State University, described it as “the greatest cheating tool ever invented,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
The concern from some teachers is that they may not be able to differentiate between a student’s work and the work of ChatGPT.
It would seem like that concern is warranted. As CNN reported, ChatGPT is powerful enough to have passed law exams in four courses at the University of Minnesota and a test at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. It’s worth noting, though, that it does sometimes stumble too. ChatGPT’s attempt at “basic equations of rocketry,” for example, was unsuccessful, NPR reported.
And according to survey data from Study.com of 1000 students aged 18 and up, more than 89 percent of students who responded said they had used ChatGPT to help with a homework assignment, 48 percent admitted they had used it for an at-home test, and 53 percent had used it to write an essay.
Teachers faced a similar issue when Wikipedia was introduced. The fear, then, like the fear now, is that students would plagiarize information from Wikipedia instead of sourcing the information themselves.
Unlike Wikipedia, there is no source attribution with ChatGPT, which presents another issue.
One of the most concerning things about ChatGPT, according to Nadav Ziv, research affiliate with the Stanford History Education Group, is that it produces information without citing sources. He described it as “free-standing information,” or information that isn’t attributable to a source.
As a test, Ziv asked ChatGPT to write an essay on the causes of the American Revolution, which it did, but there were no sources attached to the information. History can be subjective with scholarly disagreement, so the worry, he said, is that without attribution, students might treat the information as fact without taking into consideration how the source can impact credibility.
An Inevitable Part of the Future
Ziv believes that banning ChatGPT, like banning Google or any resource online, is almost impossible to do. It’s not only that students will continue to use these resources with or without a ban, but it’s actually important that students know how to safely engage with technology like ChatGPT. “I think it’s more about preparing students to safely and effectively engage with ChatGPT,” he said, “understand its limitations, understand its opportunities.”
Yotam Ophir, professor of communication at the University at Buffalo, pointed out a recurring pattern with the introduction of new technology: Every time a new technology is introduced, we find ourselves struggling with how it forces people to rethink the things they do. The best comparison, he said, is calculators, which, like ChatGPT, many found threatening to education. The worry, he explained, was about the possibility of calculators and statistical software eventually replacing mathematicians.
The introduction of these new technologies, he said, can be disruptive in nature and spark a rethinking of values, which is sometimes necessary.
“ChatGPT will be a part of their students’ lives,” he said.
“There is No Going Back.”
If you’re interested in learning more about ChatGPT and the Future of Education, take a listen to this ‘Trending in Education” podcast, starring Nancy, an actual Virtual ChatGPT Co-host, who is powered by the new dialogic toolset from OpenAI.
She, along with host Mike Palmer discuss the recent release of ChatGPT and dive into the learning implications of this technology in the world of education. They begin by discussing what this technology is in it’s own words (fascinating stuff) before exploring which trends ChatGPT sees as most impactful to education. Together, they explore the risks and opportunities emerging with new and widely accessible AI tools entering the scene. Will we lose our jobs? Will OpenAI achieve Skynet-like self awareness? What does this all mean for humans? How does this relate to the importance of durable skills? What are the implications for teachers? And for writers and the future of writing?