MaD on Infrastructures

Why Education?

As ChatGPT3 gains popularity in the media and becomes more commonly used, one notable group taking advantage of the program’s skills are students. All students can agree that homework and studying for exams are the worst parts of school. What if someone, or something, could finish these tasks for you?

ChatGPT3’s creativity and its ability to come up with solutions to advanced problems have been especially appealing to students. The program also offers step-by-step walkthroughs when answering questions so that users can fully grasp why ChatGPT came up with its answer. In particular, the program’s ability to create new responses each time makes students less likely to get caught plagiarizing and suffer the consequences of academic misconduct. As a free resource on the internet, internet-using students of all ages can access ChatGPT's power, and thus we wanted to analyze the effects that ChatGPT can have on education moving forward.

Who's Involved?

The most popular users that are involved are students. We can assume that, since it is a quite new resource and may be hard to navigate for very young students, the most popular age-groups are high school and college students. However, teachers and professors are also involved, as they now need to be aware of the threat that their students may be using ChatGPT on their homework assignments. Many teachers have been making statements on their syllabi stating that ChatGPT usage is prohibited, or else have had to be conscious of the fact that their students may be using ChatGPT to solve homework and exam questions. In addition, tutors, researchers, professors, graduates, or support services can be affected as ChatGPT's features may potentially put out of jobs, and the worry that degrees can be devalued due to automation is a constant threat.

Education: Pros and Cons of ChatGPT

These are some of the pros and cons of ChatGPT that we have come up with based on our analysis with regards to the education infrastructure:

Education: Future Implications of ChatGPT

Although it seems as if ChatGPT is a looming threat towards education and may produce lazier, "uneducated" students, it seems as if this risk does not worry all educators. Though it is hard to catch ChatGPT on plagiarism, teachers such as Professor Walsh have mentioned that it is clear to veteran educators when papers are written by students due to their unique warmth and nuances only human students are capable of capturing, as of now.

This doesn't mean that teachers aren't worried, however. Walt Gardner from an NYT Opinion piece about ChatGPT in schools mentioned that a possible solution to preventing ChatGPT usage is to have students take a baseline writing test throughout the schoolyear, so teachers can identify if their papers were written by AI. Though this may be helpful to limit the use of ChatGPT in classes, this would take a lot of work from the teacher, and these baseline tests are also not very meaningful when it comes to non-essay related tasks, such as math equations or codes.

Betty Luther Hillman who also wrote in the NYT Opinion piece, stated that if teachers are prompting their students to write about prompts that ChatGPT can easily generate pieces about, then those teachers aren't challenging their students enough. She believes that creating more complex, nuanced prompts would not only eliminate ChatGPT cheating, it would also challenge students, as well.

As you can see, there is a lot of controversy and gray areas when it comes to ChatGPT in the education infrastructure.

Jeremy Weissman writes in Insider Higher Ed, that ChatGPT is comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that it will "plague" education. He states that universities should immeidately designate an AI task force, place a stronger focus on classroom and human interactions, and to incorporate more in-class assignments. He also mentioned that schools should have designated sources specifically designed to work with GPTs and AI, but outside of this class, schools need to develop new protocol to ban GPT use.

However, as John Villasenor writes in Scientific American, its merely impossible to ban the rise of ChatGPT. If anti-AI plagiarism web checkers are put in place, this may flag students who weren't using ChatGPT, as cheaters. He writes that education is a slow industry to advance, and students are learning skills in school, such as long division, that are now deemed useless due to the onslaught of technology. Instead, we must teach students how to adapt to new technology, and to work alongside AI models, such as ChatGPT, as it is inevitable that AI will have a huge presence in society.

So How Does It Affect You?

Whether you are a student, an educator, or just curious about ChatGPT, it's clear to see that ChatGPT has its pros and cons, especially in the field of education. ChatGPT can enhance education by providing extra resources to students and can teach them more about the wonders of AI-generated models and the future of solving. However, it can also be used as a way to cheat on assignments, and impact students ability to learn as well as add more doubt and worries to teachers. If you are a student, have you/do you think you would use ChatGPT on your assignments? Do you see it as a reliable resource? For educators, do you feel as if ChatGPT will be a concern in your classroom and do you see it as a risk? Have you used ChatGPT, and do you think you will change your curriculum at all after seeing how it works?

There's no way to see where ChatGPT will go and how it will develop, but it's important to be aware and adapt to it. Curriculums are quite difficult to change, so it will be interesting to see how schools will respond to ChatGPT-3 and the countless AI-generative models that will come after it.