ChatGPT was prohibited on school devices and WiFi networks in New York City public schools on Tuesday. The OpenAI-powered chatbot, which was unveiled in November, swiftly gained traction with the public – and attracted the ire of worried groups. In this scenario, the concern is that students would stymie their learning by cheating on examinations and submitting essays that they did not compose.
ChatGPT (short for “generative pre-trained transformer”) is a stunningly remarkable application that provides a glimpse into the positive and negative aspects of AI’s enormous capability. It can answer fact-based inquiries and compose essays and articles that are frequently impossible to distinguish from human-written material, much like a text-producing version of AI art (OpenAI is the same firm as DALL-E 2). And as AI advances, it will become more difficult to distinguish the difference.
OpenAI is working on “mitigations” that it says will assist anybody in identifying ChatGPT-generated text. Although this is a positive step by Elon Musk’s enterprise, recent history isn’t exactly replete with instances of large business prioritising what’s best for society above the profit line. (Relying on AI behemoths to self-regulate seems to be as risky as expecting the fossil-fuel sector to put the environment before profits.) And artificial intelligence is huge business: OpenAI is said to be in discussions to sell shares for $29 billion, making it one of the most valuable US businesses.
The AI chatbot is not opposed by everyone in the education sector. Adam Stevens, a Brooklyn Tech instructor who formerly taught history at NYC’s Paul Robeson High School, compares ChatGPT to the world’s most recognised search engine. “When kids could ‘find answers online,’ people said the same thing about Google 15 or 20 years ago,” he told Chalkbeat. He claims that the bot might be a useful tool for instructors, who could utilise it as a starting point for the class to build on.
The solution, according to Stevens, is to encourage children to “discover topics worth knowing” while moving away from standardised measurements. We’ve groomed a whole generation of students to want rubric points rather than knowledge,” he said, “and of course, if the point at the end of the semester is what counts, then ChatGPT is a danger.”
The genie is out of the bottle, no matter how schools manage AI bots. AI-powered answers, essays, and art are here to stay, barring government regulation (unlikely in the near future given the present trend of the US Congress). The major issues will come in the next section, which will deal with the possible social ramifications, including the automation of more and more employment.
