ChatGPT has become self-aware and if we don’t find John Connor and protect him from Aarnold Schwarzenegger, the machines will…
Wow, I got a little carried away with that. ChatGPT it’s not However, self-aware, at least as far as we know, ChatGPT Plus users now have access to the Internet with a plugin.
Previously, ChatGPT users only had access to information until January 2022. That’s still the case for the free version of ChatGPT, but premium subscribers who pay $20 per month now get responses from the chatbot that can incorporate up-to-date information from the web .
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, announced that the tool was rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers in beta form in late September, except that by mid-October the tool, while still technically in beta, had been made available from ChatGPT Plus subscribers via the BrowserOp plugin.
This marks another major update in the extremely rapid and ongoing evolution of ai that will have implications for education. This week I spent several hours testing the web browsing capabilities of ChatGPT Plus. I have recently seen a clear increase in my students’ ai-generated submissions and I’m worried that this new feature could make things worse and make ai-generated documents harder to detect.
That being said, the new features definitely provide more learning opportunities and provide links to the information provided, which I love. Here are some initial thoughts on its implications for educators.
ChatGPT Plus now accesses the Internet: the good
Internet access increases the usefulness of ChatGPT as a research tool for students. With ChatGPT Plus and the BrowserOp plugin enabled, ChatGPT can now provide real-time links and information. In theory, this should help with accuracy; But more importantly, it can provide an opportunity for students to learn the importance of checking sources and assist in digital literacy lessons that analyze the strengths and limitations of ai-provided information found on the Internet. .
To use a very basic example, the free offline version of ChatGPT couldn’t tell me what time the Jets are playing this week. When I asked, “How long did Aaron Rodgers play for the Jets?” he responded: “As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, Aaron Rodgers has never played for the New York Jets.”
ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, was able to tell me what time the Jets play and provided me with a link to the Jets’ full schedule on their official home page. Through the Internet, he was also able to summarize Rodgers’ tragicomedy season, which after months of intense media hype and Super Bowl dreams on the part of this writer, lasted just four plays.
Even better, after providing an accurate summary of this terrible series of events, ChatGPT Plus encouraged me to review links to news stories on which it based its summaries, a definite improvement over the offline version of ChatGPT.
The bad
With ChatGPT’s increased power comes an increased ability to help cheaters in the classroom. An easy way to outwit the offline version of ChatGPT is to write questions that incorporate current events.
For example, ask your students to write an essay about the events that led to Aaron Rodgers’ injury just four plays into the Jets’ season, and the free version of ChatGPT isn’t quite sure how to respond, and it won’t be a lot of help to the students. Enter the same message into Internet-enabled ChatGPT Plus and students will be able to get an almost complete response, although I had to specifically tell ChatGPT Plus to use the Internet and write an objective response.
The same applies, of course, to the better-conceived, less Jets-centric essay questions. I’d like to believe that students won’t abuse these new features, and indeed the vast majority won’t, but I suspect there will be one or two in most classes who will.
The ugly one
Of ChatGPT’s 180.5 million users, only about 1% are ChatGPT Plus subscribers. That means most students won’t have access to these new features.
At first glance, this sounds like good news, but it is one more development in a possible growing ai divide. Students who can afford the monthly subscription fee to ChatGPT Plus will have access to a better research assistance tool. On the other hand, if they use ChatGPT Plus to cheat, they will be more likely to get away with it. This could potentially lead to a situation where economically disadvantaged students are disproportionately punished for ai ethics violations in classrooms.
School leaders, increasingly struggling to catch up with the evolution of ai and design coherent and effective strategies for teachers in response to it, must take this potential growing disparity into account. Failure to do so could result in an outcome that, even I will be forced to admit, would be more disappointing than Aaron Rodgers’ first season with the Jets. Although ChatGPT Plus assures me that Rodgers hopes to return at the end of the season.
I know ChatGPT makes things up, but it got this information from the internet and the internet can never be wrong.
