I recently spoke to a group of kindergarten through high school teachers and public school administrators in New York.. The topic was artificial intelligence (AI) and how schools would need to adapt to prepare students for a future filled with AI tools.
But my audience only cared about one AI tool: ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI that is capable of writing compelling essays, solving science and math problems, and producing functional computational code.
ChatGPT launched at the end of November and has sent many educators into a panic. As students use the tool to complete their assignments, teachers have been going out of their way to catch them using it to cheat.
But after talking to dozens of educators, I’ve come to the conclusion that banning ChatGPT in the classroom is the wrong move.
Instead I think schools should carefully embrace ChatGPT as teaching aids — which could unlock student creativity, offer one-on-one tutoring, and better prepare students to work hand-in-hand with AI systems as adults.
The first reason not to ban ChatGPT in schools is that it won’t work. Sure, a school can block the website on school networks and devices. But students have phones, laptops, and other ways to access it outside of class.
Some teachers have high hopes for AI detection tools like GPTZero, a program that claims to be able to detect AI-generated writing. But even if it were technically possible to block ChatGPT, do teachers want to spend their nights and weekends keeping up with the latest AI detection program?
One suggestion: for the rest of the academic year, schools should treat ChatGPT the same way they treat calculators: by allowing it for some tasks but not others, and assuming that unless students are being supervised with their hidden devices, they are probably using one.
The second reason not to ban ChatGPT is that it can be an effective teaching tool.
It could be used in class to help students create guides for their essays. You could write personalized teaching plans for each student and generate ideas for classroom activities. It could serve as an after-school tutor or help language students improve their writing skills. (ChatGPT says it can be “tuned” to work in languages other than English.)
But the main reason not to ban it from the classroom is because today’s students will graduate to a world filled with generative AI programs. They will need to know how to handle these tools—their strengths and weaknesses, their features and blind spots. To be good citizens, they will need hands-on experience to understand how this type of AI works, what kinds of biases it contains, and how it can be misused and weaponized.
This adaptation will be difficult. But who better to guide students into this new world than their teachers?
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6542043, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-23 20:10:07
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