Chat GPT: A New Threat to Education?
ChatGPT: A New Threat to Education?
General History:
With the new artificial intelligence ChatGPT, students all around the world could have an essay about the causes of WW2 to a research essay about frogs within the span of minutes. Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGPT is a chatbot released by OpenAI in November 2022. Open AI, a research company in hopes that AI can benefit all of humanity, originally started as a non-profit under the leadership of Sam Altman. According to “What Is ChatGPT, the Viral Social Media AI?” in The Washington Post, they state that ChatGPT is an AI system powered by a large language model creating sentences from texts from the internet and from searching for patterns. Although this AI is advanced, it is not exempted from mistakes, Open AI, the company that launched ChatGPT, under the funding of Elon Musk says that ChatGPT are prone to errors and faults. The functions of ChatGPT are practically endless, to song lyrics, a script for a movie, to anything- even solving a math problem. Although the original motive of ChatGPT by OpenAI was to talk smoothly and naturally with an AI- with users answering their questions in seconds, students are using this device as a way to automatically generate a question to a prompt. This tool could be used by students to write advanced and college-level essays through the fact that it can combine knowledge from many different sources from the internet. However, with a tool in the tip of a student’s finger, none of the words are actually theirs. High school students especially are using this tool as a way to get out of their assignments in most of their classes. ChatGPT had also gained a large amount of attention through the social media app, Tik Tok. People are sharing their fun and new ways to use this tool as entertainment or to just share the app to get ahead on their assignments at school. WIth social media having a role in the success of ChatGPT, people are wondering what else could also rise to popularity.
International Response:
This AI has created chaos in educators all over the world, students are using this tool to write their English assignments and solve problems. Cheating was still a major problem before ChatGPT, however with these advancements made, students can use this AI to create essays without being caught for plagiarism. Many school districts put in the effort to ban the website completely off the school issued devices, however through the students personal devices, they have easy access to the website. For example, NYC schools did a complete ban of the website so that students do not have access to this tool. However, “Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.” in the New York TImes, says a completely contrasting viewpoint of the issue. The article reads that this tool can not only help the students in personal tutoring, but unlock their creativity. Educators can also use this tool in creating lesson plans for students. Although schools have viewed this new technology as a relatively adverse tone, people also see the positive aspect of implementing it into the school system.
Recent Developments:
Open AI, which was originally a small tech company based in San Francisco, was seen by Microsoft for their potential in the future of AI. According to “Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I.” in the New York Times, in 2019, Microsoft donated one billion dollars and another 2 billion in recent years. The amount of money donated brought a huge advantage in the creation of the chatbox. In years to follow, Microsoft plans to donate even more money to push the research of AI. With the implementation of AI, Microsoft no longer has a technological disadvantage compared to larger tech companies- they can improve on products, and create new products through the AI. Recent developments created by Open AI include GPT-3 and DALL-E 2. DALL-E 2 is a digital image generator created by the user’s intel and GPT-3, similar to ChatGPT, is a language system invented to focus on constructing arguments. In addition, the expanding company is developing a new software called GPT-4, which can help with functions more efficiently than Chat-GPT- such as language translation. This is planning to release soon. In the world of technology AI’s, especially generative AI’s, can be the leading future on the internet. This technology that Microsoft is investing in can span a large variety of functions, such as a search engine. In relevance to the topic, Microsoft began implementing DALL-E 2 into the Bing search engine.
Future of the Issue:
With the largest school district in America already banning the use of ChatGPT on school issued devices, other major school districts such as Los Angeles, plan to follow suit. With the prevalence of ChatGPT on the internet and social media, it begs the question about the future of education. Even through banning the website in the school district, students still have access to the technology at home as reported by AP News in “EXPLAINER: What Is ChatGPT and Why Are Schools Blocking It?”. However, to combat this issue it has been reported that schools are issuing in class assignments instead of finishing the assignment at home- for homework. People predict that through this new development, assignments that are due at home will become less common. Not only does ChatGPT have an effect on the school system, but also on large tech companies, such as google. There have been concerns of ChatGPT replacing Google as the top internet search engine.
Work Cited
Verma, Pranshu, and Rachel Lerman. “What Is ChatGPT, the Viral Social Media AI?” Washington
Post, 6 Dec. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/what-is-chatgpt-ai.
Roose, Kevin. “Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.” The New York Times, 13 Jan.
2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/technology/chatgpt-schools-teachers.html.
Metz, Cade, and Karen Weise. “Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to
Dominate A.I.” The New York Times, 13 Jan. 2023,
www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/technology/microsoft-openai-chatgpt.html.
“EXPLAINER: What Is ChatGPT and Why Are Schools Blocking It?” AP NEWS, 6 Jan. 2023,
apnews.com/article/what-is-chat-gpt-ac4967a4fb41fda31c4d27f015e32660.