Got ChatGPT?

As the storm of AI (artificial intelligence) continues to approach mainstream America, we now see the rise of ChatGPT.

What is this?

ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022, is the tech industry's latest step in generative artificial intelligence. The AI bot has been trending on Twitter and amassed over a million users within five days of its launch.

A language processing AI model, ChatGPT can generate text and images to engage in human-like interactions. The chatbot can tell you jokes, play chess with you and can even fix your code. Its model uses a reinforcement learning method and has been trained using several resources.

Why Should Parents and Teachers Be Concerned?

Simply put, cheating. A student can load in essay terms and out comes quite a plausible essay. 

Here's a fun interactive from the New York Times where you see the prompt given to 4th and 8th graders and you have to guess which is real and is ChatGPT. (Proud to say I was right about 75% of the time.)

There ARE Benefits to Using ChatGPT

- It's free (for now but Google and others are busy developing their own). 

- Kinda fun? I listened to a recent This American Life radio show and a woman used ChatGPT to generate a story about the death of her sister in high school. The woman tweaked the phrases/words to try to see how the system would use them. It was a bit odd. 

From Joe Speiser (a tech guy) on Twitter (partial):

1. Substitute for Google search

While ChatGPT is:

• Lacking info beyond 2021

• Occasionally incorrect and bias

Many users leverage its ability to:

• Answer specific questions

• Simplify complicated topics

All with an added bonus - No ads!

2. Study partner

Type “learn”

Then paste a link to your online textbook (or individual chapters).

Ask Chatbot to provide questions based on your textbook.

Boom.

Now you have a virtual study buddy




3. Coding
ChatGPT is opening the development of:


• Apps

• Games

• Websites

To virtually everyone.

It’s a lengthy and technical process. But all you need is a killer idea and the right prompts.

Bonus: It also de-bugs your existing code for you.

4. Creative writing

ChatGPT is revolutionizing creativity.

It can write:
• Poems

• Story plotlines

• Music and lyrics

• Scripts for movies, youtube, Tiktok, etc.

Problems

- Again, cheating

- Makes it easier to win coding contests

- One version for photos - Lensa - created versions of people that looked weirdly sexualized.

- It also can’t check if what it’s saying is true.

Another AI story from The NY Times, Is A.I. the Future of Test Prep?

The result is the imperfect classroom-based instruction that we live with today: large class sizes, overworked and overloaded teachers, a deficiency of resources. Educators focus what little time they have for personal attention either on the best and the brightest or on the bottom of the class. The broad middle is often left to fend for itself.

Educators may have a new tool, A.I., to address those issues. Innovative forms of the technology, based on computer code that mimics the networks of neurons in the human brain, can uncover patterns in how students perform and can help teachers adjust their strategies accordingly. “A.I. tutors” — software systems that students interact with online — promise to give every student individualized attention, potentially remaking education as we know it.

Among the handful of companies leading that transformation is Riiid (pronounced “rid”), a start-up founded in Korea by YJ Jang, a graduate of Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Riiid already has a strong presence in the Asian test-prep app market for the Test of English for International Communication, or TOEIC, which measures English-language proficiency for business. Now, Riiid is about to enter the SAT and ACT prep market in the United States.

“We’re at the beginning of a broader societal transformation,” said Brian Christian, a computer scientist and the author of “The Alignment Problem,” a book about the ethical concerns surrounding A.I. systems. “There’s going to be a bigger question here for businesses, but in the immediate term, for the education system, what is the future of homework?”

Comments

Anonymous said…
I find it sort of terrifying. Even if AI/robots can teach children, what’s the point of learning anyway if education is reduced to the transaction of writing papers or taking tests? And what’s to learn if AI/robots make many human jobs obsolete? Yes ChatGPT creates some immediate challenges in education but if you zoom out…yikes.

Gulp

1/6/23, 7:55 AM
Amazing said…
It’s an amazing program. I use it for preliminary drafts of legal memos and briefs. I then load those into casetext (another AI program) which can provide relevant legal citations that I review and add for support.

Saves hours (days?) of work.

For historical research it is amazing. Ask it for a summary of a text.

There is another program I’m reviewing that will summarize legal documents.



1/6/23, 9:56 AM
Anonymous said…
Seriously? You think using current technology is “cheating”? Should we ban spell checkers, annotation and bibliography software, grammar checkers? What about the typewriter? Is that cheating? We live in an era that is techno driven. Using the tools of the era is what we need students to learn. If computers can do all the writing and math, maybe our education system needs to do something else.

Reader
1/6/23, 4:09 PM
Melissa Westbrook said…
Reader, you are conflating several things.

Spell checkers, etc are tech items that are used generally AFTER something is written. It does not change what the writer says but makes sure it follows English grammar.

And a typewriter? C'mon

Does ChatGPT help students learn? I don't think so.
1/7/23, 1:09 PM
Anonymous said…
To be honest I think our English and history teachers have been phoning it in for a long time. We can see this in the generations of kids who are weak readers or non-readers.

Today, teachers don't have the bandwidth to grade and edit essays, and we're not using curricula that teach S's how to write clearly and effectively anyway. ChatGPT really will be a vector of cheating as long as we keep that up.

But what if we move beyond this "all kids cheat" mentality and take a fresh look at how we teach writing? Very positive things could result where ChatGPT is either irrelevant or is a tool that gets young writers up to speed faster or frees them up for higher-level thinking, persuasion, refinement, etc.

Ultimately, I think the Five Paragraph Essay has taken a worse toll on students than ChatGPT will ever do.

Writers Anonymous
1/9/23, 1:04 PM
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