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“The big change is that the existence of a paragraph is no longer evidence of human thought.” - Clay Shirky
I’ve written a good number of things about generative AI and ChatGPT recently and here is some more. I believe there is a lot we need to digest and discuss about this new medium (I use this term much in the way McCluhan does, it fits better than “technology”). We need dialogue and broad social understanding about this new way to access information and present information.
I do support use of ChatGPT in education. Bans are just silly. However, at the same time there should be regulation and also education, lots of media literacy education as to what it actually is and how we should approach / use it.
ChatGPT is a great tool for students. It’s improved, friendlier, better presented search. Students need and should use it but we also must be honest about it as a source of information. That’s why we do need regulation - we do need to know some text is AI produced. Just like it is important to know that Abraham Lincoln didn’t say - “bring me your huddled masses.”
Students also need to understand that passing off AI as their own “thought” is just going to hurt themselves long term. Thinking, creative thought, logical thought is what has made us humans so productive, so successful on the game board of life. So students need to know they must be doing the heavy lifting. Our forms of assessment must be aligned to that fact and we need to re-think our curriculums in light of ChatGPT. And yes, the Open AI text classifier, isn’t going to cut it.
Human agency is important. We don’t want to be bystanders on the thought playing field while ChatGPT prompts itself and we just watch the back and forth.
ChatGPT hallucinates but as Gary Markus rightly points out, it isn’t lying. We need to educate students about what it actually is doing and that it isn’t a reliable source of information (nor may I add, a very creative one - rather producing bland standard vanilla). Students also need to know it is not thinking, not even close to AGI (artificial general intelligence) and that ChatGPT is just pasting together words, strings of words, based on its predicative notions about what we want to read, hear etc … It’s kind of a hypersonic cut, snip and paste machine.
We also have to de-anthropomorphize the whole ChatGPT realm and way we approach it. It is a mechanical machine. No matter the hype and how over-sold it is by its purveyors.
I was waiting for Audrey Watters, a commentator on ed-tech that I respect to write something about generative AI. Alas, silence. However, in one post in her journal she casually mentioned this …
I totally agree. Like her, I’m not worried to death that ChatGPT will change the world as we know it. It’s a tool - we will adapt and adapt to use it well, we will. Teachers and students alike.
But like Audrey, I am worried about all the skin, the $, in the game and the industry of technology as disruptive in terms of profit margin - always trying for efficiencies above all else. Sometimes, “ease” is not great for the human being, soul or brain. Work is beneficial, difficulty is beneficial. But if we know anything about tech - it is that it is aligned with the premise of everything becoming as easy as possible. And I do think for education - that’s not a good thing. We need some checks and balances on that.
That’s my stand - that’s the way it is. Like Cronkite, I think the world needs more education not less of it, as ChatGPT and tech moguls seem to think, for the most part.
Stay tuned for some more here on this topic. Next up, I want to look at ChatGPT through the lens of McCluhan’s “tetrads”. After that, look at ChatGPT through the binoculars of literature and our love affair with words, text, books.
ChatGPT For Education