Embracing ChatGPT
The artificial intelligence platform from OpenAI, ChatGPT, burst onto the scene on November 22, 2022, triggering apocalyptic warnings from educators and much gnashing of teeth over the potential for cheating and worse. Educators at all levels have the same three options at their disposal:
Ignore it and pretend that it is a fad that will fade;
Fight it, including banning the site from access through your school; and
Embrace it as a new technology in education.
So far, much of the chatter we hear centers around the first two options, neither of which holds much promise. Ignoring it is futile and foolish; The AI horse left its barn a long time ago--well before November 22--and will, sooner rather than later, play a role in almost everything humans do. Fighting it is doomed to failure. Not only does banning something increase its worth, but it is also a futile action given the ubiquity of smartphones and alternative ways to get online.
That leaves us with the third and most challenging option. What makes it a challenge is that most educators are way behind this curve and have a lot of catching up to do … fast. We remember how elementary and secondary schools approached the handheld calculator (see this excellent history) after Texas Instruments introduced the first model in 1967 (TI's popular scientific calculator came a few years later after Hewlett-Packard proved the concept). The notion that students would not do all their calculations by hand was anathema until it wasn't!
By 1978, universities allowed graduate students to analyze their dissertation data sets using SPSS or SAS software. However, a few "old school" types thought scholarship rigor went to hell in a handcart. [Vaccines and widely available antibiotics are not the only advantages of being born in the 20th Century!]
The point is that technology marches on; paper replaced papyrus, pencils replaced quills, typewriters replaced handwriting, computers replaced, well, almost everything, and now comes AI and ChatGPT. The accounting department chair in the business school at one of our client universities wrote this to his faculty this past week:
The possibilities truly are endless with AI. We need to partner with it in our education and our research products as it is part of the environment akin to calculators!
So true! School leaders now need to rethink how they support faculty in making this embrace.