When high school English teacher Kelly Gibson first encountered ChatGPT in December, existential anxiety kicked in fast. While the internet delighted in the chatbot's superficially sophisticated answers to users' prompts, educators like Gibson were less amused. If anyone could ask ChatGPT to "write 300 words on what the green light symbolizes in The Great Gatsby," what would stop students from feeding their homework to the bot? Speculation swirled about a new era of rampant cheating and a death knell for essays, even education itself. "I thought, 'Oh my God, this is literally what I teach," Gibson says.
But amid the panic, some enterprising teachers began to see ChatGPT as an opportunity to redesign what learning looks like. After her initial alarm, Gibson became one of them. She spent her winter break tinkering with the bot and figuring out ways to work it into her lessons. Gibson, who has been teaching for 25 years, came to view ChatGPT more along the lines of familiar tech tools that enhance, not replace, learning and critical thinking. "I don't know how to do it well yet, but I want AI chatbots to become like calculators for writing," she says.
Gibson's view of the technology as a teaching tool instead of the perfect cheat brings up a crucial point: Despite ChatGPT's ability to spew humanlike text, it is not intelligent in the way people are. It is a statistical machine that can regurgitate or create falsehoods, and it often needs guidance to get things right.
Nonetheless, Gibson believes she has a responsibility to bring ChatGPT into the classroom. She teaches in a predominantly white, rural, 1 low-income area of Oregon. If the only students who can use the bot are those who have access to internet-connected devices at home, the already yawning digital divide could widen. So Gibson figured she should turn Chat GPT into a teachable moment for all of her students.
Other educators suggest that ChatGPT might not be breaking education at all, but rather highlighting how the system is already broken. Alex Taylor, who teaches human-computer interaction at City, University of London, says the bot has prompted discussions with colleagues about the future of testing and assessment. In his view, rote questions that can be answered by a chatbot don't prompt the kind of learning that makes his students better thinkers. "Sometimes we've got it back to front," he says. "We're just like, 'How can we test the hell out of people to meet some level of performance or some metric?' Whereas, actually, education should be about a much more expansive idea." Olya Kudina has integrated Chat GPT into her courses at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where she teaches AI and ethics. In December she gave her undergrads a debate-style assignment: Groups of students first presented three arguments and two counterarguments, supported by academic references, without AI assistance. Next, they fed the same assignment to either ChatGPT or its predecessor, GPT3, and then compared the AI's arguments with their own.
The students were dazzled by how quickly the chatbot rendered information into fluid prose-until they read it closely. The AI fudged facts. Some of its reasoning was circular and illogical.
When students asked the bot to back up an argument with citations, it attributed work to the wrong authors. They concluded that simply copying from Chat GPT wouldn't actually earn them a good grade.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523853/1679923958/articles/Lt0G_Y8zN1680084919375/-rY95L5JL1680085046326.jpg]
Kudina says schools s...
But amid the panic, some enterprising teachers began to see ChatGPT as an opportunity to redesign what learning looks like. After her initial alarm, Gibson became one of them. She spent her winter break tinkering with the bot and figuring out ways to work it into her lessons. Gibson, who has been teaching for 25 years, came to view ChatGPT more along the lines of familiar tech tools that enhance, not replace, learning and critical thinking. "I don't know how to do it well yet, but I want AI chatbots to become like calculators for writing," she says.
Gibson's view of the technology as a teaching tool instead of the perfect cheat brings up a crucial point: Despite ChatGPT's ability to spew humanlike text, it is not intelligent in the way people are. It is a statistical machine that can regurgitate or create falsehoods, and it often needs guidance to get things right.
Nonetheless, Gibson believes she has a responsibility to bring ChatGPT into the classroom. She teaches in a predominantly white, rural, 1 low-income area of Oregon. If the only students who can use the bot are those who have access to internet-connected devices at home, the already yawning digital divide could widen. So Gibson figured she should turn Chat GPT into a teachable moment for all of her students.
Other educators suggest that ChatGPT might not be breaking education at all, but rather highlighting how the system is already broken. Alex Taylor, who teaches human-computer interaction at City, University of London, says the bot has prompted discussions with colleagues about the future of testing and assessment. In his view, rote questions that can be answered by a chatbot don't prompt the kind of learning that makes his students better thinkers. "Sometimes we've got it back to front," he says. "We're just like, 'How can we test the hell out of people to meet some level of performance or some metric?' Whereas, actually, education should be about a much more expansive idea." Olya Kudina has integrated Chat GPT into her courses at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where she teaches AI and ethics. In December she gave her undergrads a debate-style assignment: Groups of students first presented three arguments and two counterarguments, supported by academic references, without AI assistance. Next, they fed the same assignment to either ChatGPT or its predecessor, GPT3, and then compared the AI's arguments with their own.
The students were dazzled by how quickly the chatbot rendered information into fluid prose-until they read it closely. The AI fudged facts. Some of its reasoning was circular and illogical.
When students asked the bot to back up an argument with citations, it attributed work to the wrong authors. They concluded that simply copying from Chat GPT wouldn't actually earn them a good grade.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523853/1679923958/articles/Lt0G_Y8zN1680084919375/-rY95L5JL1680085046326.jpg]
Kudina says schools s...
You're reading a preview of
WIRED (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2023