ChatGPT Use in Education
Change is coming. How should educators handle it?
I am in a class right now called “Business Ethics.” It’s exactly what it sounds like - applying various ethical views and lenses to business situations and how they should be run. One assignment that we had was to read one of several articles that presented a current ethical dilemma, and write a response to it. One of the options was an article about ChatGPT’s use in schools. Of course, this is the one that I chose. I actually quite like what I ended up writing, so this is a fairly lazy post: I’m just going to copy and paste my response to this article.
ChatGPT is Here to Stay, and Classrooms Need To Embrace, Not Ban
ChatGPT released a little over three months ago. In just five days, it reached one million users. This same feat took Netflix three and a half years to accomplish, Twitter two years, and Facebook 10 months. Last week, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) released their new model, GPT-4, which is now powering ChatGPT if you pay for the premium subscription version. GPT-4 is better at creative tasks, writing, math, and coding, and has passed many human tests with flying colors, such as the uniform bar exam, SAT, and many AP tests. Microsoft is also planning to integrate it. into all of their Office applications soon. The capabilities of AI are increasing rapidly, so when Kelly Ahuna, the director of the academic integrity office at the University of Buffalo says in the article, "We want to prevent things from happening instead of catch them when they happen," I can't help but laugh a little.
Of course this progress is going to make educators uneasy. So did calculators, when they started to become more mainstream. While this issue could be viewed through any of the ethical lenses we have learned about, I think the most useful is utilitarianism, because even under this one lens it can be viewed in two ways: "wow, this new tool is allowing me to be even more efficient and finish my assignments much quicker, this is great for so many people!" or "the point of assignments is to learn, this is removing students' ability to do so, therefore it is actually hurting many people." This viewpoint is very teleological: the outcome is more assignments done quicker. When viewed deontologically, more nuance must be taken into account: are the students using this as a tool to enrich their learning (currently, most likely no), or are they using it to skip over things they don't want to do that may be beneficial for them?
The question then remains: what should we do about this? I believe that ChatGPT is a powerful tool, and one that should be utilized for learning, not banned for fear of change. When used correctly, it presents vast potential for highly enriched learning, but this requires educators to accept the new technology and implement it well. Given that there is no way to get rid of AI now that it is here, this is what must be done. Perhaps this is the end of weekly reflections and unnecessary essays, but it is the beginning of personal Socratic tutors, debate partners, ESL practice aids, and more. Education should change to utilize the tools available, not dig it's heals into the mud and regress back into handwritten essays, closely guarded exams, and paranoid grading, all of which are likely to take tolls on students' mental health. Change is coming, no matter what. Whether this change results in more rules, regulations, stress, confusion, and doubt, or ushers in a new age of personalized learning is up to educators.
This assignment was actually a discussion post, meaning that everyone’s answers are public for everyone else to see as well. Between the original article we were responding to and reading other people’s responses to it, one thing struck me very hard: people are not ready. I know that it is a bit of a meme to say “they don’t know what’s coming,” but it’s so, so true. I take it for granted that most people I interact with are up-to-date on everything going on in AI. People outside of this relatively small bubble have no idea what to expect. The world is about to change, it already is changing faster than ever, and millions don’t even know it.