10 April, 2023.
There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.” – Gray Scott, Futurist, Philosopher, and Artist
“ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with machines and make human-like conversations with AI.” – Fei-Fei Li, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot is a new buzz around. It allows a human like dialogues and even pens essays for students and might impact education system. Is this a game changer or a stalemate like one of the management fad for education community? Let’s explore more
Technology has invaded in every aspect of social order and at present it foresees as a life line of modern society with an extended intent to stay. Technology keeps on transiting over and over again to accommodate new needs of constantly fluctuating society. The technological transformation is evident since the invention of the telephone in 1876, then slowly it moved to televisions followed by social media, now the latest one trending the creative human intellect mind introduced in late 2022s is ChatGPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) by OpenAI, the best AI chatbot ever released to the common man till date. “Chat GPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform that intuitively produce human-like discussions without manual effort. With an intent to detect emotion recognition, personalization of responses, and other capabilities”.
The critics had their own apprehensions since the technological revolt from losing out face to face communication, to harm of screen time in living room, till being clued to digital content and today at the end of tunnel of self-learning. The AI versus education debate is already in air. There are buzzing queries among educational institutions raising an alarm stating is AI Technology as ChatGPT would act like a Game changer or be an Management Fad or Stalemate in education system in days ahead.
The first thought that strikes my mind was when calculator was invented in late 1960s teachers and parents were concerned about the ability of kids to remember mathematics tables. But this concern vanished over the time and the academicians changed their way to assess students’ intelligence and learning ability. Then came the internet sensation which storm the world in 1998 was Google Search and scarier than the calculator. The academician community again were worried that this search engine will take away the reading and learning habit of students the same was seen as a result of shutting down a large of book stores and the sale of books was reduced drastically. Nevertheless, with the internet revolution spreading like wildfire across the globe, societies have evolved into innovative reading solutions like smartphones, kindle etc. Another significant concern was that students might develop inertia for learning by copying and pasting the content from the search engine. To diffuse this, concern the academicians stopped asking the students to write an essay and started giving those creating comprehensions passages and answer questions pulled out from that.
Here comes the era of ChatGPT, it’s an AI tool generating human like responses and providing answers to complex question. In a nut shell Google search is designed to search the information on the web and provide relevant results for a user’s query. While ChatGPT is not a search engine but an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing to generate human- like response to their text based queries. ChatGPT had 1 million users in just 5 days and now has over 100 million users (in less than 4 months)
CHATGPT AS A GAME CHANGER IN EDUCATION SECTOR
ChatGPT can act as a game changer in the arena of teacher – student learning, the educationists need to rethink the era of AI is thriving. Institutes needs to transform, they need to embrace the pedagogical advances in the new world, can make learning more engaging and add more meaning to students. Used in the right way, ChatGPT can be a friend to the classroom and an amazing tool for teachers, students and not something to be feared off.
As Adam Stevens, a researcher remarks, ChatGPT is only a threat if our education system continues to “pursue rubric points and not knowledge.”
The educators can use ChatGPT as a new and innovative tool to create teaching content as lesson plans and assignments. They can engage and challenge young mind to enhance the class room learning, they can generate fresh ideas on specific themes, giving them periodic quiz to test the knowledge and provide them with instant feedback, develop story telling skills of students, practice problems, develop quizzes, bring in concept of gamification, virtual and augmented reality.
For students Chat GPT can provide real time personalized tutoring to make them understand the complex concepts to improve their grades generating summaries and outlines, improving vocabulary language skills, providing translations in the language of ease of understanding, enhancing test preparation, reinforcement of learned concepts, students can get more accessible and personalized learning experience, which could reduce the need for paid learning apps. Overall, Chat GPT can provide students with a variety of benefits in their education.
CHATGPT A STALE MATE IN EDUCATION SECTOR
The educationalist are airing their concerns with introduction of ChatGPT as it can jeopardies student’s willingness to develop skills like writing an essay, extensive dependence on technology, ethical and plagiarism concern in researching, solving quantitative problems at a click, lack of human connection, skeptical source of information drawn and so forth. As these could lead to cheating, breach of academic integrity above all the loss of learning ability, critical thinking and developing lifelong learning habits in students.
Few notions of educators invaded by Chat GPT on education are stated as –
“The college essay is dead”,
“The time-honored learning tradition will be disrupted from the ground up”
“AI chatbot that puts an end to learning”. The Academicians have started raising their concerns on this invention stating “A beginning of an era to stop the human thinking skills” Several universities around the world including India have banned Chat GPT on their campuses.
Students have started using ChatGPT for completing the assignments and developing an essay to complete their homework. The educators are raising their concern about the student being more dependent on this tool may lose out critical thinking ability and hampering their problem solving skills. The students become less motivated to learn independently, thus weakening human intelligence over generations to come. The answers answered by ChatGPT may not be authentic with inaccurate outputs while making decisions and may lead to negative consequences. As it’s the AI bot without human emotions, solving complex problems involving human emotions might get dis- compassionate solutions and eroding empathy and human relations.
Research is backbone of education sector, the students using this technology are may not develop the original work and this may be considered as plagiarized, which is a serious offences and have a negative consequence on both student and institute as it declines the integrity of the educational system and the hard work of other students.
Keeping this in lieu Elsevier draws its attention on publishing ethics in relation to “The Use of AI and AI-Assisted Technologies in Scientific Writing”. “The writers should not credit. AI as an author or co-author. AI and AI-assisted technologies should only be used to increase readability. Writers must say if their publication uses AI or AI-assisted technologies, and a statement will be included in the final product”.
To conclude, it is unlikely that AI bots will completely replace educators in the near future. While AI has the potential to enhance and transform education, it cannot replace the human element of teaching. It has the potential to enhance learning outcomes, make instruction more dynamic and engaging, and give students new learning and development opportunities for a well-rounded education that emphasizes critical thinking, human connection, and impartiality in a holistic manner. AI cannot replace human educators, as they bring a range of skills to the classroom beyond just providing information, such as building relationships, motivating students, and providing guidance and support. AI can support and augment these activities, but it cannot replace them entirely. Additionally, there are certain aspects of education that are difficult to automate, such as social-emotional learning and collaboration, which require human interaction and engagement. But as educators we need to assist students to wrestle with questions of humanity, obsolescence and ethical concern in VUCA world. Thus ChatGPT is another search engine, that’s built on learning by crawling and it may take long time to become intelligent like human.
