With the introduction of the OpenAI ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been a flurry of activity accompanied by doomsday predictions for the future of humanity. What is ChatGPT? What are its capabilities, and why is this remarkable outpouring of predictions of job losses, replacement of teachers, and hyper-accelerated automation?
ChatGPT is an online, open-source application that uses the piles and piles of data in the digital ecosystem to ‘write’ text, codes, formulae, and the like that ‘sound’ human-like. It is one of the most downloaded and used applications with over 100 million users who are students writing essays for their courses, professionals using it for computer programming coding, researchers using it to generate survey questions, and the list goes on and on.
ChatGPT and other applications, such as Google’s Bard, are programmed with algorithms that are a set of rules to process information or data. These algorithms ‘recognise’ patterns – the value of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools is that they can go through large datasets in a very short time. So, it appears that the AI tool can almost instantaneously ‘write’ what you ask it based on the ‘prompt’ provided.
However, we need to be clear about two things. First, AI is not ‘thinking’. It is just reproducing text based on pre-existing information that is provided by humans, which means you cannot trust the information generated unless an established authority authenticates it. Secondly, it does not have moral and ethical reasoning, meaning it does not know right from wrong. It just mimics what has been programmed for it.
AI can have profound effects on the quality of education at the school and higher education level. While students across the world are using AI, it is important to raise awareness of the benefits and dangers in its use.
The last human chess champion Gary Kasparov is instructive in this area. He helped IBM develop ‘Deep Blue’, a chess programme that ultimately defeated him. He asserts that we must work with AI and machine learning in a collaborative manner – noting that human creativity can flourish with the new technology. Today, chess programmes compete against each other, and humans cannot compete with such computer processing power that can review trillions of options in split second time frames. However, they don’t enjoy competition, have fun, or get a thrill from the win or the disappointment of a loss. Humans on much less information with their powers of imagination, inference, moral reasoning, and experiential learning are far more creative, intuitive, and we might say, wise.
Holistically, focusing on the core goal of education, we can decide whether or not AI can be used and raise awareness among students on the same. The question that we need to ask ourselves is how do we use AI to enhance students’ skills such as knowledge co-creation, logical reasoning, decision-making, intuition, moral reasoning, and leadership?
Using AI tools without thinking or understanding their use will lead to further ratification of education without any beneficial outcomes. We need to move the needle from teaching descriptive writing to teaching narrative writing rich in meaning – which is situated in the context, engages whole new processes of learning, and new processes of discovery. This will in turn give rise to time-saving opportunities that frees learners and their educators to explore new vistas. We need to research these new technologies and ‘control’ them for our benefit.
NOTE: This article has not been written by ChatGPT.
The writers are faculty members at Aga Khan University and Syracuse University.