According to a former teacher, the emergence of artificial intelligence chatbots that can finish students’ assignments will cause a crisis in learning and force educators to completely rethink how schools operate.
According to writing coach and founder of Crush the College Essay Peter Laffin, our entire writing education curriculum could be destroyed if new artificial intelligence technologies are introduced into schools and allow students to auto-generate essays. It might make us reevaluate it from the ground up, which might be advantageous in the long run.
The AI chatbot ChatGPT, which was unveiled last week by the tech company OpenAI, has astounded users with its sophisticated features. The language model is capable of writing computer code, open-ended analytical questions, marketing proposals, jokes, poems, and essays for all grade levels.
The internet is awash with predictions about how this cutting-edge technology may affect various industries and eliminate a great number of jobs. However, Laffin is most worried about how it will affect education.
He said, he doesn’t think students will be able to use this technology covertly to finish assignments. It’s going to get harder and harder for teachers to tell the difference.
According to Laffin, younger students are especially vulnerable to chatbots. Inner-city schools with lower teacher-to-student ratios will also be affected, as instructors will be less familiar with their students’ work, making it more difficult to detect the use of AI.
The easier it is for younger students to get this, the more problems it will cause, Laffin said.
College students who use ChatGPT to complete busywork assignments will experience less disruption because you are already at a level of sophistication where you understand the content, according to Laffin. However, if younger students use AI to complete a task such as writing a history paper, they have not only cheated on a writing exercise, but they have also cheated themselves out of learning the history.
The ChatGPT, which uses AI to power it, attracted attention from all over the world and in less than a week reached 1 million users. Additionally, it’s the first time a sophisticated AI text generator with an easy-to-use interface has been made freely available to the general public.
Laffin said that it might ultimately be to our advantage if this leads to a crisis in education. Because we just don’t teach writing very well, the author explains.
The writing tutor advised teachers to change their assignments and stray from the conventional five-paragraph essay format. Instead, he suggested that they develop more avant-garde teaching methodologies.
According to Laffin, the practices in schools always seem to lag a little bit behind what the latest technology is. There needs to be a lot of vigilance on this because kids are always going to be one step ahead of the teachers.
