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Is ChatGPT artificial intelligence a threat to education?
Educational institutions are wondering whether artificial intelligence (AI) technology threatens classical education or whether it is a tool that will mark a new era of education. Educators are rightly concerned that students will use the (for now) free and accessible artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write assignments instead of writing them themselves. This can very quickly jeopardize the readiness of entire generations of students, who will not develop skills such as critical thinking, thinking outside the box, writing and research.
Artificial intelligence tools that can save students a few minutes or even more hours of research, raise concerns about cheating, decline in academic abilities and, above all, loss of learning ability. The biggest threat, according to many educators, is that students will become lazy thinkers who will eventually lose lifelong skills such as research and thinking.
So, the latest enemy of education is the ChatGPT chatbot, which can access a huge database (currently until 2021) and use artificial intelligence to come up with meaningful formations and solutions to complex questions. It is even more impressive that it can do this in different languages, including Slovenian. You can read a detailed explanation of what ChatGPT is, how it works and what this artificial intelligence can do in the article entitled "What is ChatGPT artificial intelligence?", which was published in last year's last issue of RaÄunalniški. news.
ChatGPT is supposed to eliminate higher education, journalism, programming, and many other industries, if opponents of artificial intelligence are to be believed. According to Gmail developer Paul Buchheit, not even Google is safe from it. On December 1, he tweeted that the most widely used browser will undergo a major change within two years.
Another caricature of the classroom of the future imagined by AI tool Midjourney.
"He's wowing the internet with his superhuman ability to solve math problems, write college-level essays and research papers." NPR
“Education may never be more same.” RealClearEducation
"It could be a threat to education and it's not good for kids." Beverly Pell, technology consultant
“[ChatGPT] will lead to a crisis in learning, forcing teachers to completely rethink the way they teach now.” Crush the College Essay
As always, two poles were established with different views on the developing technology. Dr. Jason Wingard, a global think tank on leadership development and the future of work, also gave his opinion. He reminds opponents of technology that programs and services for solving (mathematical) problems and writing essays and articles have existed for many years. Since 2014, the Photomath application has been enabling students to take a photo of a math problem and get legitimate answers in just a few seconds. School officials and educators are also aware of the existence of paid article writing services. They adapted to this and learned how to notice them.
According to Wingard, in any case, with or without artificial intelligence, "our educational plan should be adjusted and upgraded at least annually." These adjustments would take into account the development of new technologies and services that can The services of plagiarism and other forms of cheating spread. Almost every university and higher education institution, including in Slovenia, uses dedicated software to detect cheating and plagiarism. OpenAI, the developer responsible for the success of ChatGPT's artificial intelligence, has also committed to curbing the new technology. Scott Aaronson, visiting researcher at OpenAI, said the company is "exploring hiding cryptographic signals, or watermarks, in ChatGPT results so that anti-cheating software such as Turnitin can more easily identify them."
ChatGPT AI has huge potential for good
Putting all concerns, doubts and fears aside for a moment, Jason Wingard points out that AI has a huge potential to improve life and (higher) education.
Ian Bogost, a writer for The Atlantic, says that “[ChatGPT] is certainly not going to replace colleges or journalism or managers. But it offers these and other domains a new instrument […] with which they can play with an unprecedented amount of textual material." Bogost says students could critique chatbot compositions, spot inaccuracies, and add their own insights.
Artificial intelligence is not infallible, as data scientist Teresa Kubacka quickly found out. The AI bot ChatGPT asked a question about the invented term "cycloidal inverted electromagnon". The answer not only sounded plausible, but was also supported by quotes, which turned out to be false.
Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, confirmed the findings of some users and experts. Their ChatGPT AI is just as fallible. As he says, “ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create the illusionÄ impression of size." Simply put, ChatGPT, in cases where it lacks the appropriate knowledge, is able to create a complex web of misinformation that sounds correct in the eyes of the average user. The ability to mislead and often provide false information is also the reason for banning its use on the popular programming forum Stack Overflow.
Proponents of artificial intelligence are of the opinion that it can be an excellent tool for speeding up certain tasks, but with the awareness of its limitations. A good example of Ähuman-AI collaboration is Jason Fleagle, a website developer, who had ChatGPT generate code for a website that was not perfect. But artificial intelligence saved him a lot of time in this case. She created an imperfect framework for him, which (at least for now) can only be perfected by human hands.
Although there are many concerns about the impact of AI on education, Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, disagrees with most of them. He sees AI himself as a learning companion, which he has already implemented in his teaching plan. ChatGPT helped him develop the lesson plan, lectures, assignments and evaluation plan at the master's level of study.
At least at this point, ChatGPT and AI in education in general seem to have more opponents as allies.
Black clouds on the horizon for ChatGPT?
Australia's leading public universities are still thinking about how they will assess in 2023 due to new technologies. "Reshaping assessment is key and it is happening now in our universities as we want to outpace the development of artificial intelligence," he says. Matthew Brown, Deputy Chief Executive of Group of Eight Australia.
Flinders University in Australia was among the first to establish a dedicated anti-cheating policy using computer technology, including ChatGPT. "Instead of banning students from using such programs, our aim should be to help academic staff and students use digital tools to support learning," says Professor Romy Lawson.
In New York, access to ChatGPT has been completely disabled for the needs of formal education. The Department of Education blocked access to the program, citing "negative impacts on student learning and concerns about the security and accuracy of content."
Whose pockets will artificial intelligence fill?
There are other concerns, however. OpenAI is a Silicon Valley company. It was created as a non-profit because only a non-profit company should be able to develop “friendly” artificial intelligence that would work in favor of humanity. Soon, however, investors began to appear, such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (PayPal) and others. In 2019, Microsoft also came forward with a billion-dollar financial injection, right after OpenAI became a limited liability company.
All the more criticism is also aimed at ChatGPT's methods and practices. Initially, the artificial intelligence should use the reinforcement learning model to reduce the number of problematic/false answers. In doing so, we would rely on a hand-made training kit, which takes a heavy financial toll.
Now, it seems that the hottest AI tool for learning and correcting its mistakes is using the users themselves. In this way, you can access incredible amounts of human feedback in an almost free way. Questions arise as to the extent to which this project is still open at all, and whether money has overshadowed the innocent original idea of a beneficial development of artificial intelligence. Microsoft has also already entered into a partnership to integrate the tool into the Bing search engine.
What will be the fate of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence?
