How to take help from ChatGPT

Though the pandemic drove home the point that classroom teachers and in-person instruction cannot be readily replaced by technology, education and digital devices are inextricably interwoven nowadays. The latest artificial intelligence (AI) entrant that is making waves is ChatGPT. To quote itself, “ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI” that “can generate human-like text” in response to innumerable questions.

If search engines like Google readily come up with a host of links that pertain to a topic, ChatGPT goes the extra mile of synthesizing this information and providing readymade answers, written in cogent sentences. Plus, it can solve mathematical problems and write computer code. So, why bother ploughing through numerous links and problem sets when ChatGPT can provide almost instant answers? And, how is this new tool going to impact education?

Like any powerful tool, ChatGPT may be used judiciously or nefariously. Just as we rely on books and websites for information, analysis and insights, we can use ChatGPT to aid and extend our learning. This application is indeed mind-boggling for the range of questions it can answer.

For example, I asked it, “Are you intelligent?”, “Is psychology more important than economics?” and “Is my friend angry with me?” And, to each of these, it gave an intelligent, well-articulated response. Of course, we don’t expect the bot to know whether my friend is angry, and with due humility, it said, that it doesn’t have the “capability to know” if my friend were upset. Then, it went on to counsel me about why asking my friend directly may be the only way of ascertaining my hunch. It also solved “7x+7=35” explaining the steps before arriving at x=4.

In an article in The New York Times, Kalley Huang writes that many college professors are redesigning their courses and assignments as students are bound to use this tool. One professor asks students to now write their first drafts on papers in class, with restricted access to online tools. Further, when students make changes to subsequent drafts, they have to justify their revisions.

In lieu of papers, some professors plan to assess their pupils on oral and group work, and handwritten exams in class. Other professors are asking students to evaluate the responses provided by ChatGPT.

Navigating through loopholes

Like all AI tools, ChatGPT has its foibles. When I asked it to comment on the literacy skills of digital natives, it assumed I meant “digital literacy of digital natives.” My question, however, was not limited to digital literacy per se. So, the bot tripped up here. So, educators may take advantage of the bot’s fallibilities and design assignments where students have to point out lacunae in the tool’s responses. Alternatively, when appropriate, students may be asked to weave in their own experiences while writing about a topic.

While some schools in the United States have banned ChatGPT on their schools’ systems, disallowing students to use the tool is shortsighted as many pupils will access it outside of school. Of course, just like cell phones, their use may be forbidden during formal testing. In other instances, it is better to harness the app to help students extend their understanding.

And, what about teaching? In another article in The New York Times, Kevin Roose interviewed a high school teacher who used the bot to assess student essays. Apparently, the app gave “more detailed and useful feedback,” in far less time, than if the teacher had corrected the papers himself.

Another enterprising teacher asked the students to use the app to help generate outlines for an essay. Using the app-generated outlines, the students then shut down their laptops and wrote fairly deep essays by hand.

Further, educational institutions will have to have sessions on authentic learning and “academic integrity.” Some universities are adding “generative AI” as part of their plagiarism policies. As these tools are only going to get more sophisticated and efficient over time, helping students recognize the potential and limits of new technologies is what education should probably aim for.

(The author is a psychologist)