ChatGPTand Generative AI:The Newest Technology to Turn Education on its Head

Hi,I'm ChatGPT!

How can I help you?

Jake Parsons

FourthYear

Human Geography Major

History & Education and Society Minors

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a groundbreaking language model that has had a major impact on various fields, including education. While ChatGPT offers numerous benefits to students and teachers, it also poses a potential threat to the integrity of the learning process. Some students have started to use ChatGPT to write their assignments, raising concerns about academic integrity and the validity of their knowledge. In this article, we will examinethe impact of ChatGPT on education? both positive and negative aspects. On one hand, ChatGPT provides students with instant answers to complex questions and facilitates interactive lessons. On the other hand, its use in completing assignments undermines the purpose of education and raisesquestionsabout the credibility of a student's work. As we delveinto theimpact of ChatGPT on education, we must also address the potential consequences and find ways to ensure that this technology is used ethically and responsibly.

CHATGPT IS A TYPE OF CHATBOT, or an AI that has learned and trained on thousands of online texts, articles, books and websites in order to form statistical relationshipsbetween words Asa result, it can produce responses to a user?s input, mimicking what human writing might read like. Chatbotshaveexisted for alongtime, perhapsmost commonly in the realm of customer service, where you might be prompted online to talk to a frustrating?digital assistant?that attemptstosolve your problem ChatGPT is far more advanced than any regularly encountered chatbot, and thus, has the capability to dramatically alter fields like education.

After being launched to the public by the Bay Area company OpenAI in November, concerns soon rose about how ChatGPT could be used by students to produce written assignments Being trained on billions of human-written texts, ChatGPT produces extremely human-like works, often making it difficult to differentiate between what could be written by a student and what could be written by an AI. Within amonth of ChatGPT?srelease, Edward Tian, a Torontonian studying at Princeton developed a program called GPTZero, with the stated purposeof preventingstudentsfrom abusing the generative AI. This program allows teachers to input their students?written work to receivescores that indicate the likelihood of the text being AI generated. GPTZero in its current state produces scores that essentially measure ?randomness? and ?variation?, components of writing that are more common in human writing than machine writing Since the writing of chatbots is technically unique, it isnot assimpleasaplagiarism detector

I encourage anyone unfamiliar with ChatGPT to give it a try. A user can instruct the software to write something general, such as a 500-word description of nihilism, or something more specific such asa1000-word essay on themesof materialism in The Hobbit. To display this, the introduction paragraph of this very article was written by ChatGPT simply by asking it to ?write an introduction paragraph to an article discussing ChatGPT?s impact on education and learning?. These are examples of prompts for the program that could pose a threat to the academic integrity of students, but by no means are these ChatGPT?s solefunction. The program can be used almost as a simplified search engine, drawing on internet sources to help explain a concept. For example, asking ?how do you find out if a gene is a positive or negative regulator?? is an example of how a student I personally know used the program to develop a better understanding of a factual question they struggled with from class

All of thisbegsthequestion, how will thisnew tool changehow classesfunction, and how can teachers adapt this new tool? I posed these questions to educational researcher Dr Cresencia Fong who works at University of Toronto Schools (UTS), an affiliated high school on the University of Toronto campus Dr Fong was less concerned about how ChatGPT wasbeing used by studentsto subvert the expectations for assessment, conceding that the overall trend may be for courses that rely on long form written works to transition to more in-class writing assessmentsand perhapseven handwritten work. After all, teaching and learning have had to adapt to new technologies before. Dr. Fong was instead more excited about the opportunities that ChatGPT provides for teachers and students. She explained how ateacher at UTSwasalready usingit in their Grade 12 AP Research course The teacher had each student enter their year-long research question into the chatbot, asking it to answer the question and critiqueit productions can also be the subject of critical analysis activities in classes like the aforementioned AP Research class. No matter how individual teachers plan to or plan not to utilize ChatGPT, it is paramount that educators understand what ChatGPT is and how it will inevitably affect their classrooms and students. Ongoing professional learning is fundamental to being an educator; and in the case of new technologies like ChatGPT, having a strong understanding of itsimpactsiskey to successin an evolvinglearningenvironment

This experiment had ChatGPT peer-review the question and resulted in some students rethinking how they posed their questions One student?s research question was focused on how healthcare can be improved for poorer Canadians, and asked ChatGPT to list relevant actors to the research question. When the chatbot was finished, the student realized they had not considered the profits of private insurance companies closely in their research Using ChatGPT in the idea-generating stage of a student?s assignment is just oneexampleof how it can beused asatool that does not necessarily cross the academic integrity line. Dr. Fong also suggested that instead of writing work for students, the program could literally edit student-written work for clarity, giving studentsan additional version of their writing to compare and take from as they see fit. In our conversation Dr. Fongstressed theimportanceof usingChatGPT asa tool to encouragecritical thinkingno matter how it is used, and not solely to do that thinking for a student.

ChatGPT can also be an asset for teachers Some teachers have begun to use it to help brainstorm lesson plans already at UTS, and ChatGPT