New York public school students are no longer allowed to use ChatGPT. The artificially intelligent tool can quickly write texts and solve questions, so that teachers fear cheating on homework. Flemish education is considering the tool, although experts advocate embracing ChatGPT.
Make a book review, write an essay or think regarding the structure of an essay. These are assignments that students spend many hours on every week, but with ChatGPT they have had a handy tool since the end of last year. The chatbot of the American technology company OpenAI can write texts that are of a particularly high level in no time. The tool represents a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence and is already used by millions of people.
However, not everyone in the education field is enthusiastic regarding the chatbot. The New York Department of Education prohibits students from using it. The argumentation for this is somewhat reminiscent of the discourse from the early days of Wikipedia and digital spelling correctors. There is a strong fear that digital tools would make people less critical or lazy.
Within the Flemish educational field, there is also uncertainty regarding the way in which schools should deal with the artificially intelligent tool. For the time being, the education umbrella organizations receive few questions, but it is clear that the technology will not just disappear. After the Christmas holidays, the pedagogical services of Catholic education and Community education (GO!) will therefore consider the matter. “Artificial intelligence has become an indispensable part of society,” says GO! spokesperson David Janssens. “We would like to provide guidelines on how the technology can be used in addition to the traditional means.”
It may be interesting to make teachers more aware of the impact of the innovation. Identifying whether an essay was written by a high school student or by ChatGPT is more difficult than it seems. Edward Tian, a computer science student at the American Princeton University, therefore developed a program that analyzes texts and estimates whether they are written by a human author. It takes into account how complex and uniform sentences are.
There is no efficient and Dutch-language equivalent of the program, but according to Professor of Computational Linguistics Walter Daelemans (UAntwerp), work is being done on it. “A system might compare each essay with texts of which you, as a teacher, are sure that the student wrote them himself. That way you can estimate who the author is.” Although he does say that this takes a lot of time and effort.
As an alternative to New York’s zero tolerance, the educational field can also choose to adapt to the new reality. Attention must be paid to the strengths and weaknesses of the technology. For example, ChatGPT currently has a hard time writing extensive academic papers and the tool is not completely reliable. “The system can formulate so beautifully that you can easily be misled by it,” says professor and head of the Digital Mathematics research group Ann Dooms (VUB). She herself recently discovered that the system still has trouble calculating with square roots. Proving that the formula for a quadratic equation was correct also turned out to be impossible. “It remains a language model. Deducing what a root is or how a mathematical logic works purely from language is apparently difficult,” she says.
Artificial intelligent systems have developed particularly rapidly in recent years. There is a good chance that the developers of ChatGPT will soon solve the current problems or enter into collaboration with models that are mathematically stronger. In any case, both Daelemans and Dooms believe that the technology can be a good tool.
Dooms refers to the German teacher Hendrik Haverkamp. He decided to actively assist his students as they used artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. They had to deal critically with the output and indicate which elements they wanted to keep or not. It is an approach that inspires Dooms, who also wants to introduce her students to the technology in the coming semester. “It is very interesting for mathematicians to find out where the reasoning of such a system goes wrong. You can learn a lot from that yourself.”
After all, it is quite possible that some students use a tool like ChatGPT to ‘cheat’ when doing their homework, but for such people there have been ways to make their work easier before. In primary and secondary education, parents are happy to lend a hand, in higher education school assignments are sometimes made by third parties for payment. “It’s hard to judge something that was made at home anyway,” says Dooms. The popularity of ChatGPT can therefore be a reason to think regarding modern evaluation forms. “We need to teach students how to use the technology with creative input. It is the future of professional writing,” concludes Daelemans.