AI revolution is on its way

It doesn’t herald the apocalypse, but it won’t be a passing fad – the advent of Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT cannot be ignored by educators, Will Brodie writes.

Former Google Vice President Hugh Williams told Education HQ ChatGPT “could herald a revolution in education comparable to the invention of the internet”.

When ChatGPT launched in December 2022, it was immediately obvious that it threatened any education system based on written assessments. An epidemic of cheating was predicted. “Goodbye homework,” Elon Musk said.

ChatGPT is a software program that writes like a human. Type a question into the free ChatGPT chat window and you instantly receive a competent, grammatically sound, correctly punctuated, perfectly spelled written response based on the AI’s reading of millions of articles and books. The words can come in any style requested: rap battle, iambic pentameter…

Or a Year 10 essay

And you can have a ‘conversation’ with GPT, asking more questions to further explore your topic.

The user can then copy and paste the responses to form a credible ‘answer’ for an assignment.

The Queensland, NSW, Victorian and Tasmanian departments of education announced they would block students from accessing the chatbot, following the lead of New York City education officials who moved to prevent its use on school networks and devices.

“I wouldn’t presume to be an Education Department executive and have to make those kinds of decisions, but what I would say is that this technology is here and it’s here to stay – it’s going to get better,” Williams said.

“I think students are going to find a way to use it, even if you try and block them on the school network. And I think as a profession, teachers and education departments are going to ultimately need to embrace this and figure out how to get students to use it in the right way, understand it, and adapt the way they teach and the way they run their schools to incorporate this kind of technology.”

Williams compared the onset of AI to the emergence of the world wide web in the 1990s, when students stopped reading as many books and conducting “deep research” at the library.

Jeremy Weinstein, a professor at Stanford University, told The Age the AI revolution will make the world “completely different”. He said “overwhelmed” schools, teachers and regulators aren’t ready for the technology and don’t have the infrastructure to “allow the benefits of this technology and mitigate its potential harms”.

In January an anonymous survey of 4500 Stanford students found that 17 per cent had used ChatGPT in their final exams and assignments.

However, there are educational experts who say the AI shake-up is required.

AI will change education because education needsto change

Those who welcome ChatGPT say it will banish the outmoded reliance on written responses to questions, which they consider a major shortcoming of modern education.

Age commentator Adam Voigt, a former principal, insisted that despite the “panicked reaction among the teaching fraternity” to ChatGPT, the advent of AI technology was not an “existential threat to the role of teachers” though it will “fundamentally change the way we educate”.

“Any assessment that a student completes independently at home is now going to be compromised.

“Finally, we may have crossed a point of no return, unable to justify trudging the tired path of delivering a lecture at school, setting a task, collecting the task, marking the task and returning a grade that has so slowed our educational progress.”

He says the integrity of a student’s learning will be impossible to determine unless they are under direct supervision, so “the very formula for educating them will finally be forced to change”.

Writing for The Atlantic, Ian Bogost said he’s glad “dumb” ChatGPT will hasten the demise of take-home essay exams, “a stupid format that everyone hates but nobody has the courage to kill”.

Academic Dan Dixon says, “AI is to prose what a calculator is to maths”, and assessment processes are currently given priority over learning.

“Students are reduced to an essay, and an essay to a grade.”

Digital education expert Matt Miller says AI will “eventually start to push some of those terrible assignments out and force us to come up with something new”.

“It’ll probably be painful, and many of us will probably hate parts of the process. But in the end, we will evolve to something better.”

Forbes senior contributor Peter Greene says the teaching of writing too often requires students to follow a set format. A common example is the ‘five paragraph essay’, consisting of main ideas, supporting ideas, and conclusion.

“Teachers end up grading students not on the quality of their end product, but on how well they followed the teacher-required algorithm.”

Experimenting with ChatGPT, Greene found that “to get a better result from the program, the user has to put the kind of detail and thought into their instructions that should be used for writing the essay themselves”.

This irony offers a hint to the possible uses of the technology.

Media analyst Ben Thompson suggest the real skill in future homework assignments will be in verifying the (often faulty) answers an AI system churns out, so students learn how to be “a verifier and an editor, instead of a regurgitator”.

In a University of NSW round-panel discussion academics from four disciplines agreed that AI will be a “fantastic personal tutor”, its infinite patience and consistency would be a boon for people with autism and it could “level the playing field” for people with disabilities.

Arts, Design and Architecture Professor Cath Ellis said because AI can’t feel, and doesn’t have emotion, its use will force us to value “the things that are truly human”.

Law and Justice Professor Lyria Bennett Moses said ChatGPT would be useful for simple tasks in minor matters where the information was repeated. But AI has no creativity. “No AI would have written the Mabo decision… it took creativity to say no, given history, we need to fundamentally rethink this matter”. Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT, based on previous information, has no ability to “go beyond what came previously”.

Knowledge is no longer power

Writer and academic John Weldon points out that in the fifth century, writing itself was feared as the great disruptor by philosopher Socrates, who worried it would “bring about mass forgetfulness and ignorance”.

Weldon says the onset of writing and then the printed word were feared because they “questioned accepted modes of knowledge creation, husbandry and control”.

But he believes these days, “power and worth now lie in the ability to synthesise information to form new and innovative ideas.”

AIs like ChatGPT are threatening because they have the potential to do that synthesis for us.

However, he believes that tools that do the grunt work of synthesisation can offer us more time to innovate and create.

“We must embrace the chaos that ChatGPT will bring, let go of the ways of working and thinking that it makes redundant, and look for the ways in which, like writing and print, it can free our minds to do more and to reach further.”

ChatGPT’s top three ways to help teachers (according to ChatGPT)

1 Automating Grading: ChatGPT can grade student writing assignments by providing automated feedback on grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.

2 Lesson Planning: ChatGPT can provide ideas, resources, and suggestions for activities.

3 Content Creation: ChatGPT can help teachers generate writing prompts, discussion questions, and quizzes.

References

https://www.theage.com.au/technology/time-is-running-out-to-subdue-ai-s-overwhelming-power-20230130-p5cgdf.html

https://www.theage.com.au/national/socrates-railed-against-the-advent-of-writing-ai-might-have-terrified-him-20230126-p5cfrp.html

https://www.teaching.unsw.edu.au/chatgpt-ai-in-teaching

https://www.smh.com.au/national/schools-right-now-face-a-choice-fight-the-wave-of-chatgpt-or-surf-it-20230118-p5cdle.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgpt-bot-excel-ai-chatbot-tech

https://www.fenews.co.uk/exclusive/chat-gpt-is-this-an-alert-for-changes-in-the-way-we-deliver-education/

https://feedbackfruits.com/blog/chatgpt-a-threat-to-education-opinion

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence-writing-ethics/672386/

https://www.theage.com.au/national/if-ai-has-all-the-answers-universities-must-change-the-questions-20230122-p5cek6.html

https://stratechery.com/2022/ai-homework/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2022/12/11/no-chatgpt-is-not-the-end-of-high-school-english-but-heres-the-useful-tool-it-offers-teachers/?sh=376ebdf11437

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-chatgpt-teachers-weigh-in-on-how-to-manage-the-new-ai-chatbot/2023/01