AI, do your homework! How ChatGPT pitted teachers against technology

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Issued on: 15/01/2023 – 07:18 Modified: 15/01/2023 – 07:16

Paris (AFP) Know-it-all chatbots landed with a bang last year, convincing an engineer that machines had become sentient, spreading panic that industries could be wiped out and creating fears of an epidemic of cheating in schools and in universities.

The alarm among educators has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks about ChatGPT, an easy-to-use AI tool trained on billions of words and a ton of data from the web.

He can write a decent essay and answer many common classroom questions, sparking a fierce debate about the very future of traditional education.

The New York City Department of Education has banned ChatGPT on its networks due to “concerns about negative impacts on student learning.”

“While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it doesn’t develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills,” said the department’s Jenna Lyle.

A group of Australian universities said it would change exam formats to ban AI tools, seeing them as outright cheating.

However, some in the education sector are more relaxed about AI tools in the classroom, and some even perceive it as an opportunity rather than a threat.

‘Important innovation’

This is partly because ChatGPT in its current form keeps screwing up.

As an example, think that Guatemala is bigger than Honduras. It is not.

Also, ambiguous questions can lead him astray.

Ask the tool to describe the Battle of Amiens and it will give you an acceptable detail or two about the 1918 WWI battle.

But it does not report that in 1870 there was also a skirmish of the same name. It takes several hints to realize his mistake.

“ChatGPT is an important innovation, but no more so than calculators or text editors,” French author and educator Antonio Casilli told AFP.

“ChatGPT can help people who are stressed by a blank sheet of paper to write a first draft, but then still have to write and style it.”

Researcher Olivier Ertzscheid of the University of Nantes agreed that teachers should focus on the positives.

In any case, he told AFP, high school students were already using ChatGPT and any attempt to ban it would only make it more attractive.

Instead, teachers should “experience the limits” of AI tools, he said, by generating the texts themselves and analyzing the results with their students.

“Humans Deserve to Know”

But there’s another big reason to think educators shouldn’t panic just yet.

AI writing tools have long been locked in an arms race with programs trying to sniff them out, and ChatGPT is no different.

A couple of weeks ago, an amateur programmer announced that he had spent the New Year holidays building an app that could parse texts and decide if they were written by ChatGPT.

“There is so much chatgpt hype around,” Edward Tian wrote on Twitter.

“Were this and that written by artificial intelligence? We humans deserve to know!”

Its app, GPTZero, isn’t the first in the field and it’s unlikely to be the last.

Universities already use software that detects plagiarism, so it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see a future where every essay is rammed through an AI detector.

Activists are also tossing the idea of ​​digital watermarks or other forms of signifier that will identify the work of AI.

And OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, said it was already working on a “statistical watermark” prototype.

This suggests that educators will do well in the long run.

But Casilli, for example, still believes that the impact of such tools has enormous symbolic significance.

It has somewhat upended the rules of the game, whereby teachers ask questions of their pupils, he said.

Now, the student interrogates the machine before checking everything in the output.

“Every time new tools appear, we start to worry about potential abuse, but we’ve also found ways to use them in our teaching,” Casilli said.

2023 AFP

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