ChatGPT in education: embargo or embrace?

possible impact has become much more evident in the form of ChatGPT, with social media blowing up with discussions about how it could be positively used, balanced by others proclaiming it as the downfall of education as we know it.

So, what is ChatGPT?

CHATGPT

ChatGPT is a powerful language generation model developed by OpenAI. It’s based on Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture, and is capable of generating human-like text on a wide range of topics.

ChatGPT is a type of machine-learning model known learn patterns and relationships in the data and generate text similar to the text on which it trained.

In order to generate text ChatGPT takes in a prompt and generates a response one word at a time. The model uses the context of the prompt to predict the next word in the sequence, and the process is repeated until the desired number of words is generated. For example, when generating a response to the prompt ‘What is the capital of France?’ The model will use the context provided in the prompt to generate the answer ‘Paris’.

It’s worth noting that ChatGPT is a pre-trained modelwhich means that it has been trained on a massive dataset of text, and it can be fine-tuned to a particular task or domain by providing it with additional training data. This fine-tuning step allows the model to adapt to the specific characteristics of the intricacies of the language. The model could also help students to generate new ideas for essays and research papers.

In addition to its potential uses as a writing assistant and automated essay scorer, ChatGPT could also be used in other areas of education - such as the more conversational agents and virtual tutors, where it could be used to provide students with personalised feedback and guidance on coursework and automated essay assessment. Marking essays is time-consuming, and often tedious for teachers, and it can be difficult for them to provide individualised feedback for every student. Using ChatGPT educators could quickly and easily grade essays by inputting a prompt and a student’s essay and the model could then generate a score and feedback. This would save teachers time, allowing them to focus on providing more personalised formative feedback to their students.

Another potential positive use of ChatGPT in education is as a writing assistant. The model could be used to help students improve their writing by providing suggestions for vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure; this could be especially useful algorithm reliant on the data it has ingested; as a result it may get facts incorrect and its overall responses may, occasionally, not make logical sense. That said, in the time I have had to play with it, I have been generally quite impressed by the responses it provides.

ChatGPT’s language-generation capabilities could also be used to create educational content such as interactive storybooks, quizzes, and educational games - for example, it could be used to generate interactive dialogues and stories, in which students are required to make decisions and engage in conversation to test and improve their understanding of a particular subject.

From a negative standpoint, there are concerns that students could use ChatGPT to create their answers to homework or coursework exercises, thereby allowing them to avoid putting effort into the tasks. As ChatGPT is an AI its responses will be original - albeit based on training content - so they are unlikely to trigger plagiarism solutions.

Some schools have already taken the approach that ChatGPT is a tool which enables students to cheat and, therefore, have immediately sought to block it. I feel this is the wrong approach for two main reasons.

1. Blocking is largely ineffective because: which follow will become more and more common in the

Might they enable students to focus less on the basics - which AIs will increasingly be able to help with - and more on the higher-order skills? Who knows what other ways they may benefit education in years to come?

There were significant concerns with the invention of the printing press, radio, television and the internet, but these are all now established parts of our lives. Useful AI models are here - and ChatGPT is just one - and, I suspect, they too will eventually just become another part of modern life so we just need to work out how to make the most of them.

Oh, and by the way, parts of this article were written by ChatGPT; can you identify which parts?

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