The Arrival of ChatGPT Means Working With it

We’ve had essay mills, contract cheating, good old-fashioned plagiarism but AI has ushered in perhaps the biggest threat to academic probity, ChatGPT.

Given a few instructions the ChatGPT AI can produce an essay in any style on any topic in short form or long almost instantly and it's a game changer for cheats and those given the task of stopping them.

The technology is here and the instinct is to ban it as has been the case with disruptive technology many times before, an approach which has generally failed.

Professor Matt Bower a professor in the School of Education at Macquarie University, specialises in the innovative use of technology for learning purposes and says the ChatGPT’s existence needs to be acknowledged and perhaps incorporated in teaching.

"School and university students around the world can now enter a wide range of homework and assignment questions into the free and easy-to-use ChatGPT interface, and receive immediate solutions. You can ask ChatGPT to 'explain key factors that increase risk to infectious disease', or 'argue the advantages of capitalism over socialism', or 'write a computer program in Python that finds the first n prime numbers' and the platform will provide seemingly intelligent responses.

“That means students can complete standard assessment tasks by simply typing in their essay/forum/multiple choice questions into ChatGPT and submitting their responses. While the quality of answers is variable, ChatGPT uses a large language model and machine learning to continually improve its answers. 

"Consequently, educators worldwide need to urgently rethink the purpose of education, what they teach, and how they assess. In particular, teachers need to adjust their curriculum to focus on how to critically evaluate and work with artificial intelligence. Assessment and homework tasks need to be more personalised and context-specific, focusing on higher order thinking skills and the values that should underpin our work with AI."

Professor George Siemens, University of South Australia,  researches networks, analytics, and human and artificial cognition in education. He has delivered keynote addresses in more than 35 countries on the influence of technology and media on education, organizations, and society.

He says, “Something about ChatGPT feels different as it begins to challenge our most human of attributes - namely the claim that we are the most intelligent entities on the planet .

"The advancement in generative AI (such as ChatGPT) over the last several months has captured the attention of the general public and AI researchers by highlighting how quickly a ‘state change’ in technology can arise and how rapidly it can disrupt our existing views.

"We are used to these types of “once in a generation technology advancement” as they come every few years now: the iPhone, social media, cloud computing. What current AI technologies reveal, however, is that we are entering a future where we collaborate and engage with AI in all aspects of our life.

“It will require a dramatic rethinking of many traditional approaches to how we teach and what we assess our students have learned. Schools and universities have a choice to make: 1. Decide to block or ban this generation of technology. Or 2. Embrace the opportunities that AI offers and rethink teaching and assessment in classrooms and help prepare learners with the skills that are most urgently needed in society and in the future workforce."

Doctor Chris Bigum at Griffith University says, "AI is just a prediction machine. If you get comfortable about what it's capable of doing, it becomes a really interesting basis from which you can write.

“ChatGPT, like most AI apps is a prediction machine. It predicts text, based on a large language model that has been trained with a large amount of text. When you prompt it with a question or ask it to do work on some text, it draws on the language model to provide output to the user. To use it well, you need three complementary skills and knowledge: a basic understanding of what it is and how it works, good prompting skills and the ability to judge the quality and accuracy of what it produces. 

“ChatGPT and its descendants, which will appear more quickly than most imagine, are capable of generating coherent, plausible texts derived from written pieces that other people have written over time. It can produce eloquent nonsense that would be easily picked up by a teacher if submitted as part of an assignment. 

“ChatGPT will pose challenges for both teachers and their students. It will take time for them to come to terms with making sound educational use of it. Developing complementary skills will be an important part of coming to terms with it.      

“There will be a range of responses and it will vary a lot from discipline to discipline. For example, ChatGPT can write computer code which can be sound and sometimes rubbish. As a new part of the education ecosystem, being able to have good conversations with students will be crucial.”

Image by Tara Winstead