AI Apps like ChatGPT are a wake-up call to redefine the holistic nature of education.
Technology and machinery have long exceeded human strength, speed, and efficiency. But OpenAI’s recent release ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that—unlike previous technological advances—seems to mimic human intellect in a manner rivaled only by science fiction.
In general, ChatGPT can transact much of the work done in modern educational settings. This has led to a spate of articles with alarming titles like “Freaking Out About ChatGPT,” “Will Everyone Become a Cheat?” “The End of High School English,” and “The College Essay is Dead.” A recent article opened with this ominous forecast: “Professors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years.”
In response to its unnerving capacity to disrupt core fixtures of education like homework and essays, many are quick to point out the limitations of ChatGPT in order to prove human brainpower is still greater than increasingly intelligent AI. Yet while dialogue models like ChatGPT still have glitches and quirks, they will undoubtably get “smarter” and more adaptive with time.
ChatGPT’s capacity to arrange information and knowledge is a challenge to educational assessment from elementary to graduate school. More accurately, AI’s threat is proportionate to how we have come to define education.
As Amit Katwala writing for Wired put it, modern education is structured to teach people a single skill: how to collect and transmit information. And in this sense, alarm is warranted. To the extent education is reduced to absorbing and regurgitating information, AI like ChatGPT and other adaptive dialogue models will continue to surpass humans and radically …
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