ENTER THE CHATBOT

WHAT DOES THE INTRODUCTION OF AN EXTREMELY POWERFUL AND WIDELY AVAILABLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MODEL MEAN FOR OUR STUDENTS? WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR OUR WORLD?

BY HANS DE GRYS

WHEN I WAS in 3rd grade, my teacher, Mrs. Gaither, warned us that there was a danger potentially lurking in our homes — something so nefarious it had the potential to ruin our lives. If we used it, we would probably end up failing out of school and being totally unemployable. That incredibly dangerous thing was not drugs. It was not even Saturday morning cartoons. It was the four-function calculator, a hand-held electronic device that could add, subtract, multiply and divide in the blink of an eye.

In the 1970s, even simple models cost more than a used car. By the early 1980s, the price had plunged to less than $10, and calculators were finding their way into many homes in the small South Carolina town where I grew up. By the time I was in 3rd grade, some students (it was rumored) were using calculators to “cheat” on their math homework. Why learn the multiplication tables when a device could do it automatically for you? Mrs. Gaither loved us very much, and she was terrified that cheating with calculators would result in our never learning basic math.

Needless to say, her concerns, while appreciated (in retrospect) were unfounded. I still learned what 6 times 7 is (40 … something?) and I actually use calculators and their 21st century descendants (like Excel and Google Sheets) pretty much every day.

Near the end of last year, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab in San Francisco, released its latest chatbot: ChatGPT. The free software was made available to the public in November 2022 — and in less than a week more than a million people had used it. Chatbots were understood to simulate computer-generated conversations, and some of them were getting pretty convincing in the way they processed and mimicked human speech. ChatGPT, though, even in its beta version, was something of an entirely different order. It could answer questions, draft emails, suggest advertising copy, compose and correct computer code, even write grant proposals, college application essays, and poetry.

As I first read about its capabilities in stories and articles on NPR and The New York Times, and then experi- mented with it myself, I was dumbstruck, awe-inspired, and, frankly, very concerned about its startling powers and ridiculous gaffes. As an educator, I was also having my very own Mrs. Gaither Moment™. What does the introduction of an extremely powerful and widely available artificial intelligence model mean for my students? Especially an AI that is often amazingly prescient but sometimes confidently dead wrong? What does it mean for our world? Will this advance fundamentally change my job? Will students now “cheat” on their Lakeside homework? In January, a professor at the Wharton School of Business reported that ChatGPT had scored between a B- and B on the MBA final exam.