It’s easy to get tired of the news that technological innovations are going to destroy entire industries. Every time a new innovative technology appears, people seem determined to make predictions about the ways it will completely uproot our society.
For a recent example of this, we can look at the Metaverse, nft-market-crypto-digital-assets-investors-messari-mainnet-currency-tokens-2023-9#:~:text=Most%20NFTs%20are%20now%20likely,is%20now%20%245%2D%2410.” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>NFTsand a host of other Web3-adjacent hype that has fizzled out amid claims that they would be the next step in the future of the Internet.
Despite all this hype, few new technologies have had the same widespread fascination as artificial intelligence, with a specific focus on ChatGPT. This (initially) Elon Musk-backed adaptive learning project has become the poster child for the ai renaissance, spearheading mass adoption of a technology that’s still in its cultural infancy early enough for people to have legitimate concerns. about its effect on the world.
One area where ChatGPT has been the subject of much debate and deliberation is the field of education, and it’s easy to see why. ChatGPT is an ai learning model that has been trained using decades of data and information from around the world, it is a tool capable of convincingly providing users with solutions to both simple and complex problems on virtually any topic imaginable.
This has quickly led to ChatGPT being discussed as the death of tasks, and while this may be a bit premature, it is not a stretch to suggest that the proliferation of artificial intelligence as a widely accessible tool has the potential to permanently alter the way we look. educational frameworks.
So is ChatGPT the villain of modern education or is there a place for OpenAI software in the next steps of educational development?
Potential benefits of ChatGPT in schools
While standardized learning in middle and high school has its benefits in terms of providing young people with the skills necessary to live, work, and thrive, it is by no means perfect. Large classrooms mean that many students are taught by a limited number of teachers, and with teachers currently in high demand in the United States, Australia and beyond, today’s secondary school education workforce has a lot to manage and navigate. when they teach the next generation.
This is by no means an entirely new topic, but it is already aggravated by the pandemic in ways that are still evident to us today. With this, some have suggested that artificial intelligence and adaptive learning software could fill the gap. ai learning models have proven to be highly effective at detecting errors, providing feedback, and absorbing data much faster than is possible through traditional means.
Naturally, this is in no way a substitute for traditional education. Much of education is taught to think about problems as well as retain knowledge in ways that self-guided use of an ai learning tool is unlikely to replicate. However, the ability of students to have information explained to them on their own terms so that they can process it in their own time is valuable from an early learning perspective.
Having said all that, however, there are genuine concerns regarding the use of such technologies in a more practical setting.
The challenges of ChatGPT
The problems with ChatGPT and other learning models are rarely discussed compared to the broad and varied claims that we will all be replaced by it in the near future. However, once you dig a little deeper under the surface, you begin to see that many of these learning platforms are, at best, inefficient and, at worst, woefully misleading.
From non-existent references that are used to obtain information to base versions of ChatGPT that fail to do calculations in many cases, and the need to improve knowledge about it. cybersecurity and dataIt’s clear that we’re simply not at a point where ChatGPT can be fully trusted, and in the field of education, this poses problems.
As we mentioned earlier, the primary goal of education is not simply the acquisition and regurgitation of data. Education teaches people how to think about complex problems and without that support, it is easy for students to fall into the trap of blindly accepting information that has been algorithmically generated for them by a learning model that is not even as reliable as others. , no-Alternatives to pre-trained learning models.
Additionally, as a text-based learning tool, ChatGPT and other PLMs are simply not equipped for hands-on learning. An ai may be useful for providing feedback for an English assignment, but what about more specific practical tasks, such as physical education, or tasks that are more subjective to interpretation? An overreliance on artificial intelligence models will not be conducive to all fields of study, and those for which it could be beneficial are still at the mercy of problems that are endemic to large data sets when used this way.
Furthermore, fixed data sets, no matter how large, are, as the name suggests, fixed. The way these algorithms work in their current forms is by extracting data sets that have a different cut-off point, meaning that new information and cutting-edge discoveries are not necessarily added to the system, and even if a study were added in the data set, it would still be possible for earlier, now inaccurate, information to arrive through its sheer volume.
To be clear, this is a problem that can be overcome, but the techniques to retrain these AIs to gain new information are very expensive and may require a significant amount of tuning that is currently not available in most cases.
So what’s the verdict?
As with most questions, the answer to whether ChatGPT is a friend or foe to education lies somewhere in between. Will it be the death of education as we know it? Probably not, but it’s also not a perfect addition to the learning process and educators hoping to support their students should use it carefully.
As the future becomes the present and the present becomes the past, we will surely see many technologies aimed at altering life as we know it, and eventually we will see those claims become reality.
However, for those who have a simple vision of ChatGPT as the inevitable next step for educational institutions, there are still many obstacles to overcome before their idea of the future can become a reality. But who knows? The future remains a big question mark in terms of how this type of technology will develop in the future, and it is clear that ai has not reached its final form.