Don’t Panic: 3 Reasons Why ChatGPT is Not The End of Education (Updated)
Have you heard the news? Education is over.
Know why? AI.
Breathless media reports explain that an artificial intelligence (AI) service called ChatGPT will result in the obsolescence of the English essay, render teachers irrelevant and assorted other tragedies.
Give ChatGPT a prompt and it can create conversational essays. The resulting text is generally a fluent and coherent response to the prompt.
In fact, ChatGPT is so good, it will lead to The End of High-School English. After all, students no longer need to compose a response to an essay or prompt. They can just let ChatGPT do the writing. This dire scenario has led schools to block ChatGPT over fears of its impact on learning. Some have already capitulated to AI. An unconvincing New York Times article proclaims "Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It."
Education is not over. And you are not obsolete.
Here are three reasons not to panic about ChatGPT and similar AI services.
3 Reasons Educators Shouldn’t Panic About ChatGPT
1. We’ve Been Here Before
ChatGPT is merely the latest existential technological threat to education.
Other threats have included:
Papyrus: Socrates was not a fan, fearing a diminishment of people’s capacity to remember.
Calculators: numeracy was sure to suffer.
Spell checkers: why study spelling when Microsoft Word will help you out?
Wikipedia and Google: These services were going to render the educational system irrelevant. Then everyone realized Wikipedia and Google were, well, Wikipedia and Google, not the end of sentient thought.
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses): Remember those? Thought not.
Cheat sites: these services have been selling solutions to textbook publisher test bank questions for years.
Paper Mills: these sites enable individuals to pay random people on the internet to write research papers or essays for them.
In other words, we’ve seen it all before. We made it through COVID. We’ll survive ChatGPT
2. Startups Will Mint Fortunes Inventing Solutions
Clever people who can code understand they can make money by creating solutions to problems. The education sector is huge. It sees ChatGPT (and similar technologies) as a problem. Startups will make millions providing solutions to problems posed by ChatGPT (and whatever comes next). For example, turnitin.com, famous for its plagiarism detection software, is working on a tool that detects prose composed by ChatGPT
Edward Tian, a computer science senior at Princeton, has been working on a solution in his free time. He created a site that tries to detect if ChatGpT wrote an essay.
Socratic Digital had high hopes for these services. However, we’ve decided that neither of these alternatives should be relied upon. They are early attempts to detect AI generated text, but should not be used to determine that a student has, in fact, submitted AI generated prose.. Let’s see how this plays out. In the mean time, try some of the following suggestions.
3. Educators Have Agency
There is no way of getting around it. AI will be a big part of our future. However, it’s way too soon to start making declarations about it’s existential threat to education. Educators will learn to live with such services. Teachers may even co-opt them in pedagogically authentic ways. Here are some possibilities.
Hello Papyrus: Broadly, this mindset will emphasize analog tools like pen and paper wherever instruction and assessment occur.
Old School: In this scenario, education goes offline. Students receive instruction and submit assessments (including essays) in physical schools.
Testing Centers: Schools might emulate the SAT or IT certification testing center model in which candidate knowledge is evaluated at a physical facility. In this hybrid arrangement, instruction occurs online and summative and/or formative assessments occur in physical schools.
ChatGPT as TA: Some teachers may use ChatGPT to grade assignments, send emails to parents, construct lesson plans and other time-consuming administrative tasks. This would create a recursive loop in which students submit ChatGPT written work and educators provide feedback composed by ChatGPT. This one makes Socratic Digital’s brain hurt.
Prompt Engineering: Educators may construct prompts and assignments that exploit the weaknesses of artificial intelligence. For example, AI software like ChatGPT are often confounded by word problems and fail to correctly calculate compound interest. Because much of the text it draws upon is scraped from the internet, it is frequently incorrect about basic facts. particularly when responding to complex or lengthy questions.