Hello! Perhaps you've asked to chat GPT to help you with your homework recently.
Is this acceptable? What do schools around the world think of this new technology?
As an educator who is passionate about using technology in the classroom in creative ways,
what do I think about this technology? if you've used it before it's likely you've
done something like this and asked it to write a student task for you. I showed this presentation
to teachers at our school and many gasped at how easy it was for chat GPT to generate this
content. It does a reasonable job at producing an original, if not particularly nuanced essay.
Note this essay IS original - it was written by AI and it didn't show up as plagiarized using
the school's detection software (turnitin) ... at the moment! But openAI are looking to encode
AI generated text with some sort of fingerprint so that machine written text can be identified.
There are already AI writing detection engines that staff are using like "AI-cheat-check" here
and AI writing recognition is currently being incorporated into products like the school's
turnitin. When I showed chat GPD to our teaching staff, the teachers understood that education is
going to have to shift yet again as it did with the arrival of the calculator the internet and
indeed Gutenberg's printing press in 1440. Any teacher who thinks that they are going to lecture
in class and set a writing task for homework and then assess that work we'll need to think again.
So given that I think passing off machine written texts as your own work IS plagiarism,
why am I here telling you about chat GPT? Well I think there are many creative ways
that students can use it to enhance their education and I want to show you some of them.
Although chat GPT is still officially in a research preview mode, you can access it
and sign up for free with a simple sign up. So let's delve into what it can do.
Chat GPT does not have access to the internet live at the moment but it has a huge snapshot
of information from 2021 you can use it as your personal research assistant as I've asked it
here to summarize some research about teaching. You can ask it to summarize the main theories or
main themes of one of those bits of research. You have a personal research assistant or librarian
at your disposal who's infinitely knowledgeable! Your teachers might use it to generate questions
to help gauge your understanding. Why don't you create your own quizzes and see if there are
any areas of weakness in your understanding? You could try refining the prompts you give
it and generate more appropriate questions or multiple choice questions as I've done here.
You can also summarize information that you give it. You can copy and paste text and ask
it to summarize that text or you can give it a web page and ask it to summarize that web page.
As chat GPT remembers the previous conversation you can ask it to clarify any aspects of
information it's already provided or give more details in a specific area.
You can use chatGPT to help you remember information. You could
ask it for a glossary of glossary of terms for a particular topic with no further information.
Noting that many science students find that subject particularly challenging
because it introduces new vocabulary about as quickly as a French or Chinese class,
this might be a very handy tool to help you with new vocabulary.
You might like to think about other creative ways you can use it to help you remember information!
How about using a rap to help you remember the taxonomic groupings in Biology?
People often remember things if they have a rhythm or melody attached to them.
You can ask it to create a poem in Shakespearean style for you to learn
particle physics vocabulary! Reading that poem would certainly test your
understanding of the subject as you look for accuracies in the poem it has written.
One great creative learning approach is to use chat GPT to generate a Choose Your Own Adventure
story. Here I've done so and it will tell me parts of the story or parts of the history and
then respond to my prompts as to where to go next with that story. This might be a really
nice way to read some new information and might just spark your interest for a topic.
Here's another example of me asking ChatGPT to ask adaptive questions.
It asks questions to the student on algebra and it provides feedback based on the response.
The mathematical examples it generated here weren't particularly well adapted
for learning but the potential for adaptive tutoring in the future is clearly huge. You
could also try asking it to solve problems for you that you provide. I tested this with
a few difficult physics problems and it didn't always get the answer correct as I discovered
so be careful and do your own questions and research too. Coding is a particularly strong
in chat GPT. Here I've asked it for help with Excel formula but it knows many different coding
languages and it can convert text into code and code into text and it can provide explanations
for that that code. One researcher has done this with an entire game that chatGPT coded.
if you want to get better as a student, educational research tells us that feedback
on your work is critical. Your teachers can only provide so much feedback so why not ask
chatGPT to help? Here I've provided it with a student example essay and asked
it to generate some feedback to improve that student's writing. Why don't you try asking
for feedback on your own writing? Be specific about the kinds of feedback you want and then
try to incorporate that feedback into your writing before submitting it to your teacher.
Finally a word of caution: this example demonstrates that chat GPT does regurgitate
things it's seen already on the internet and so it can be seen to plagiarize ... in small amounts.
Mind you, I'm not sure which one of us wouldn't include one of these two
classical opening lines about beans if you were asked to write a humorous poem.
Well, there are clearly huge implications for learning for students, teachers and schools
to consider, but one thing is certain - AI is not going to go away anytime soon!
Firstly as I've already said, using AI generated text in your own work without declaring that fact
is plagiarism. Detection engines can identify this already so don't do it!
However, many universities and now many schools, like ours, are embracing the benefits of AI.
It's clearly going to be a part of your future workplace and life and
I think it highlights that the best aspects of teaching are actually about the relationships
between students and each other and their teacher and that is never going to go away.
There are plenty of other ethical considerations - like is AI generated art actually art for example?
Benn Jordan in this YouTube video argues that the question is largely
irrelevant when there are so many artists trying to scratch a living
in a challenging environment and his video is well worth a watch.
it's also worth considering what biases AI can introduce on the world. Bandee
Barker is an American academic who tweeted her concern about the overly sexualized images that
Lenza produced based only on pictures of her face. Another thought that springs to mind is:
can an artist copyright a style and what happens if AI successfully copies that style?
There's clearly a lot to consider and unpack and these are obviously complicated questions,
but one thing is certain - AI is not going away anytime soon and it can be of huge benefit for
students. I would consider the next steps important for every student in every school:
Explore the possibilities of chatGPT and other AI systems. Don't use AI to
cheat - systems are being adapted right now to catch you and there
are serious consequences if you do including dismissal at university.
Think about ways you can use chat GPT to enhance your learning and think carefully about what makes
good learning. Look for biases and prejudice in AI writing, especially as these models develop;
in the future they will be soon testing their own hypothesis and they will soon have access to
the internet so there's lots to unpack but good luck and I hope you enjoyed this presentation!