The Impact of Artificial Intelligence – What are the implications of ChatGPT

featuring David Muniz, Director of Technology at Lake Forest Country Day

 

 

It’s midway through the year and everyone is digging deep into this late pandemic return to
normal. After years of disruption, anxiety, and fatigue, we all need to thrive professionally. Many
of us have been thinking hard about curriculum, instructional practice, goal setting, and probably
a DEIJ initiative. It’s the work. It’s both what we love and what keeps us up at night. It’s the
growth we crave, and the thing that fills our calendars. We all have so much important work on
our plates. And yet I urge you if you haven’t yet, to pay close attention for just a moment to the
development of accessible AI and consider its impact on our professional practice. The impact
of Artificial Intelligence (AI), its growing sophistication, and its accessibility make it important
enough for you to get in on the conversation. Plus, I’ve already had multiple parents from our
school community mention it to me, so it’s also on their minds. I’m using conversation literally.
We’ll only come to some reasonable conclusions through professional dialogue. Consider this a
starting point.

 

On November 30th of 2022, a software development company called Open AI released a public
version of their AI chatbot, ChatGPT. This tool responds to questions /prompts in conversational
language. You can ask ChatGPT to write a 500-word essay on immigration as an 8th grader,
and it will do it. You can ask it to write the same paper as a 4th grader, and it will do it. You can
then ask it to compare and contrast the two essays because it remembers your conversation
and will do it. I know this because I tried it. You can see those and other experiments here.
A chatbot is a software application that can interact with a person via a chat interface. Much like
the way you text your friends and family, this is how you would communicate with a chatbot.
Chatbots aren’t exactly new. If you’ve ever been to a website that has an “assistant” pop up out
of one of the corners to offer to answer questions, you’ll have seen a chatbot. AI isn’t exactly
new, either. Many people have been developing AI software you probably use without realizing
it for a while now. The level of sophistication is improving, but at least according to some,
ChatGPT is not that innovative. That aside, what’s new in ChatGPT is accessibility. Access to
the website and the ability to write in a conversational language are all you need.

 

It’s also part of a trend. Last fall, the internet was flooded with images and conversations about
AI image generators. There’s even an example of someone that used ChatGPT to write a
children’s book and an AI image generator to illustrate it. Of course, the creative world has
pushed back on books and magazines using AI-generated illustrations. AI is here, and it is
making an impact.

 

For many educators, the concerns around students using this to do their homework have been
at the forefront. Indeed some school districts have already banned the tools and blocked access
to it on their networks. I agree with many others that a different approach makes more sense,
though each school will have to weigh what’s best for its context.

 

First, it’s helpful to understand more. For example, How good of a job can it do? Can a teacher
be convinced that a student and not a computer did the writing? It’s mixed. There are examples
of ChatGPT doing amazingly well. A professor at the Wharton School found that ChatGPT was
able to pass the final exam for its MBA program.

 

On the other hand, ChatGPT is sometimes incorrect. There have been countless incidents of
users reporting that it got some facts just plain wrong. You can, of course, decide for yourself
how convincing it is by looking at the examples I shared or trying it out.

 

What about the legitimate use of the tools? Many professionals immediately began using
ChatGPT to offload tasks like writing emails or preparing copy. The result may need more time
to be ready to publish, but it gives the author enough of a start to make editing and polishing
quick. One user prompted ChatGPT to write code to add a feature to their website, making the
extensibility of a website available to anyone without knowing how to code. Another language
professor experimented with using ChatGPT to provide personalized language instruction to his
students. This way, he could ask ChatGPT to provide practice with a particular skill or concept,
and the AI would generate the lesson and resources. ChatGPT speaks multiple languages, so it
could also help as a translator. Is it so hard to imagine a time when schools teach the most
efficient and ethical uses of a tool like ChatGPT? We use calculators for numbers, so why not
for words? How different is this from Grammarly (also AI-driven)?

 

I’m not advocating that we arm each of our students with a ChatGPT calculator. I’m remaining
open to what this means for our profession and learners. If we just shut it down and stick our
heads in the sand, we may not fully appreciate the challenges and benefits of this new
technology.

 

With that in mind, consider not blocking ChatGPT from your school network. If your network
works at all like ours, you’ll have visibility on who is using that tool on school computers. If this is
beyond your control, it doesn’t change how to best respond in the classroom. And that response
looks not so different from what has been the drumbeat for a while now; a frequent variety of
formative assessments, with a summative performance-based assessment. Of course, that’s a
broad ideal. So here are some places to start.

 

• Reflect on what this means for you and your students. How does this impact your
  practice? How does it impact your assessments?
• Consider if any of your assessments can be convincingly completed by ChatGPT.
  • Log on and see how the AI responds to your assessment task such as an essay
    prompt. This will help you get a feel for what to look for.
  • If what it outputs is convincing, reconsider the task.
  • Until you have that sorted out, get to know tools like GPTZero to help identify if
    something was likely generated by AI. This will be helpful, but it works in
    probabilities. Consider this a transition tool. Ultimately, you’ll want to find
    assessment tasks that are ChatGPT-proof. Or maybe ChatGPT friendly.
  • Talk to your teaching teams and colleagues about their thoughts and maybe even begin
    formulating strategies to address these developments in your practice.
• Find other opportunities to engage in further professional dialogue
• Read more:
  • What is ChatGPT And How Can You Use It?
  • Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.
  • ChatGPT: Teachers Weigh In on How to Manage the New AI Chatbot

 

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but these are the early days for AI. We’re at the beginning of
something sure to grow rapidly. It’s a VUCA world. We need to let our wonder lead us. We need
to let our ideals inspire us. We need to listen and evolve.