Editor,
It’s clear that 2023 has become ‘the year of AI’. Since ChatGPT was launched late last year, a plethora of evangelists and doomsayers have taken the opportunity to tell us exactly how artificial intelligence (AI) will change the world.
One side heralds AI as the ultimate productivity saviour, promising a life free from mundane tasks. The other side paints a terrifying portrait of AI unleashing chaos and destroying humanity. Without wishing to add yet more predictions, the likelihood is that neither of these extremes will happen any time soon.
Yes, AI has revolutionised the world around us making it easier to access basic to tertiary needs. Yes, we need to move along with technology as with time congruence. However, what I want to stress is the impact of AI as in ChatGPT in the education system.
Since its public release ChatGPT – the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI has experienced rapid growth and widespread adoption. Its role in education, however, remains a topic of contention.
While some view it as a tool to enhance learning and reduce teacher workload, others see it as a threat to integrity which opens the door to cheating and plagiarism.
I initially thought I could use ChatGPT to write this article. I couldn’t summon up the energy for a writing session so why not use AI? I recorded myself speaking into a microphone with rough notes on ideas for the article, then used AI to transcribe into text, which I then put into ChatGPT, and asked for a specific word article.
Hey presto, it took about five minutes, and I had my article. Like most ChatGPT outputs, however, the result was banal and uninteresting. So, I sat down and wrote this article myself – it obviously was time consuming, with a further couple of hours of editing and fact-checking. One sentence survived from ChatGPT.
So, did ChatGPT increase my productivity? Probably not. But what it did do was give me confidence that I could write the article. By spending those five minutes with AI, I convinced myself there was an article in me struggling to get out!
Academic integrity is the primary concern for using ChatGPT in our educational institutions. Many educators believe that using ChatGPT for writing assignments will only promote cheating and plagiarism. Since ChatGPT generates responses quickly, it will decrease students’ abilities to brainstorm, think critically, and be creative with their answers.
With ChatGPT in the hands of students, home assignments are problematic. With rapid AI advances, almost anything that you ask students to do, they can ask AI to do for them. This is a minor manifestation of a deeper phenomenon – that of outsourcing thinking. A student getting AI to do an assignment is outsourced thinking. The same can be done by teachers; they could ask AI to develop lesson plans or assess student responses.
AI will enable the possibility of outsourcing thinking for all. The human temptation to follow the path of least resistance may overwhelm other considerations. It is a distinct possibility that education, which is significantly about developing the ability to think, will degenerate and implode in many parts. Over generations, if we continue to outsource thinking, we may lose the very capacity to think, or it will get sharply diluted.
I am writing this not because of the fact I strongly dislike ChatGPT, no no! Rather a silent alarm or a silent harbinger of AI on academicians and scholars on their total dependency on AI like ChatGPT.
Rather than restricting the use of ChatGPT in education, bodies such as the the Education Ministry of the Government of India could hold the people who provide these services to account so that the potential for harmful use is minimised.
Digital skills, especially the use of Artificial Intelligence, should be a part of the academic curriculum, so the government should be considering how to ensure that schools teach students to be safe and effective critical users of this technology; just as they are already supported to stay safe online.
I’d like to see this sort of critical training becoming part of not just Computer Science, but also other curriculum areas ideally led by experts with a deep understanding of such technologies, so that we will not be totally glued to the use of AI only but use our cognitive and brain generated ideas in the future too and not be cognitively impaired!
Chanmiki Laloo
Shillong – 793002
