I really dived into ChatGPT this Friday. ChatGPT is an AI driven natural language tool and it picked up quite a storm the last few days. It’s… impressive! I fed this AI a lot of questions and tasks and the responses were great! The bot gave my tips for parenting, it wrote a base model of an essay about why kids younger than 13 years old shouldn’t use social media and it explained to me the steps of writing a good value proposition for a videogames company! What’s interesting is if you feed the AI a question to form an opinion… that’s something it doesn’t do and sometimes, it gives you a fair consideraton on what you should or shouldn’t do. Some funny stuff is there to experiment with. As a teacher, I have some opinions / feelings towards this tool (you’re a teacher or you ain’t 🙂 ) So bare with me and I hope I can give you some interesting insights to form your own opinion!
1. Should / Could students and teachers use this tool for education purposes?
Well, a surprising question from me as a teacher! 🙂 The “could” doesn’t need much discussion because they (the students) and we (the teachers) will! The “should” well, that’s the interesting part. I feel my answer will be… yes! The simple fact: this technology is here to stay and will grow. It won’t go away. So I feel we should embrace it.. with some caveats! In its current form, it can give great first guidelines to all kinds of topics on, for example, how to position a brand. It can give some common sense directions / steps for students to tackle lots of problems and tasks. It could help students by structuring essays. But I feel it should be used as a first dip into a certain task / activity. The magic still happens by us humans where we put different steps into perspective and context and work on our tasks. The tool can help with a structure, but the student should always check and verify by using cross-reference sources. Furthermore: if the AI showers you with ‘facts”, there are no sources mentioned. It’s a big coding machine that constantly scrapes all kind of information. As always, check and verify. I feel this tool can help students (and teachers) during their education. I asked this question to the chatbot and its answer is… pretty spot on I guess! (see below)
2. Wow, I am impressed! Will this technology take a piece of the Google pie?
There are lots of new technology discoveries out there, but the feeling I got from experimenting with this chatbot is something unique. It evokes the sense of a new technology phase, maybe a phase where even Google could lose some authority. Imagine this chatbot as a voice assistant instead of Siri or “Hey Google”. The natural flow of the language used, the clear steps it gives you if you ask for some tips…. if this ai develops in more specific ways like for example: categorizing musicians, recommending related artists et cetera, this could be a more useful voice assistant than the current ones. I feel that Google and other parties will take note of this development and will soon launch their ow AI language prototype. I feel this is unavoidable as this bot challenges the use of Google search!
3. Ethical dilemmas
Sure, a hot topic now and in the future, as this tool will constantly evolve. You could have discussions about the disapearing line between man and machine. What if this tool can learn and recognize emotions? The dangers for education? The simplicity of using this tool for students and therefore, maybe they don’t feel as if they have to dive deeper….. will “writing a general piece of text about a certain topic” still be useful as an assignment? Can we trust this AI? Since this is an algorithm, who is turning the knobs – who is tinkering with the system? How “natural and objective” is the information? Lots of dilemma’s and I don’t have the answer (I have some opinions though 🙂 ).. but…. maybe this AI tool will give us more freedom in skills development. With the command (text) inputs, you’ll receive some great written text that you can use, people with a language barrier / dyslexia will experience a great tool where they can overcome their troubles. If you’re stuck with coding your software, you can ask for great automated help by using the right text input and it spits out code for you to use! The better you’re able to give this bot the right text inputs, the better the information you’ll receive. With all new technology: this should be an exciting thing to take into account. Let’s see how we as a society respond to the development of this bot. If you know the movie “Her” with Jacquin Phoenix, this bot closes the gap a bit between current reality and the alternative reality in that (great!) movie.
Here are my first two-cents on the matter. I’m excited to learn how you, as a reader, feel about this tool. Let me know!