by Ben Chase
Ben Chase is a guest blogger and educator from Noble High School.
Using ChatGPT is not unlike buying food at the grocery store. Take the fruit and veggies section, as an illustration. When we shop, we simply grab a bell pepper, apple, asparagus, or onion with (usually) little thought about where our produce comes from or even how it comes into existence in the first place. How many adults know what their produce looks like before it is harvested? Yet, we seem to be perfectly okay with that reality. To further illustrate this point: I care deeply about my health, but in regards to my favorite cracker—Cheez-Its—I have basically no idea what the ingredients are. Nevermind where they came from.
When using ChatGPT recently, I discovered a version of this same story:
PROMPT:
Write an email to parents of my high school students explaining that grades close for progress reports on Friday, March 3, 2023, and to please feel free to reach out with questions or concerns regarding their student’s grade in class.
RESPONSE:
Subject: Reminder: Upcoming Progress Report Deadline – March 3, 2023
Dear Parents/Guardians,
I hope this email finds you well. As we approach the end of the third quarter, I wanted to remind you that the grades for progress reports will close on Friday, March 3, 2023. This means that any work that needs to be turned in or any missing assignments should be submitted as soon as possible.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to encourage you to reach out to me with any questions or concerns that you may have regarding your student’s grade in class. I am always available to discuss your student’s progress and to provide any additional support that may be needed to ensure their success.
Please keep in mind that there are many factors that contribute to a student’s grade, including class participation, homework completion, classwork, quizzes, and tests. If you have any questions about how grades are calculated, I would be happy to discuss this with you.
Thank you for your ongoing support of your student’s education. I look forward to continuing to work with you to ensure that your student is successful in their academic pursuits.
Best regards,
[Your Name]
I have a basic understanding of how large language models like ChatGPT work, but have no real idea how it generates the above response in a matter of seconds. How this text was generated doesn’t really matter, though, because it is convenient—just like produce from the grocery store. Sure, I might have to edit this text response for a minute to make sure it perfectly fits my teaching context (I teach in a standards-based school), but I also wash, chop, and season my vegetables before cooking them.
Let me be clear: I am not advocating that we give little to no thought to what AI chatbots like ChatGPT write. But it feels like human nature to do just that: stop thinking about where exactly something came from. We can think about a chicken’s life before it’s killed and packaged, or we can ignore that thought. The same holds true for the source of wood for 2x4s or plywood we use for home projects. Or the source of cotton for my impossibly cheap but comfortable pants from J. Crew.
As tech experts are pointing out, it is essential to source where chatbots are getting their information from. There is a real and valid concern that these AI systems will provide erroneous, misleading, and dangerous responses. A costly example was when Google unveiled their AI chatbot, Bard, in a public event. Bard falsely claimed that the James Webb Telescope took the first ever pictures of exoplanets.
Microsoft seems to have taken the first step in this transparency with the test version of the “new Bing” in which they collaborated with ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, to create. To this point, I would recommend listening to two podcasts from the New York Times’ Hard Fork show. The first is Bing’s Revenge and Google’s AI Face Plant, which details the power of the new Bing’s search technology and what it does to cite its sources. Then, for a fuller picture of what the (dystopian) future of AI might mean, listen to The Bing Who Loved Me, and Elon Rewrites the Algorithm. As you will see if you listen to these two episodes back to back, the technology is so new that we really have no idea what it is capable of.
What is clear, though, is that this technology is highly capable and will soon be integrated into our everyday lives. It is, in no uncertain terms, here to stay. Teachers and schools are going to need to figure out how to not only tolerate it, but how to teach with it. Though there are some school leaders and educators who have spent a lot of time thinking about and working with this new technology, many teachers I’ve talked to haven’t even played with the AI chatbot technology yet—an essential step to their necessary understanding. In an interview with Education Week, Sal Khan is quoted as saying, “This is the future. I’ve told all our employees if you do any form of writing, and you’re not at least trying to use a large language model, you’re probably not efficient at this point.” As illustrated in my use of the program above, ChatGPT can already save teachers time, but in many places, including the New York City Public schools, the technology is banned.
Our future with AI, both as teachers and also just as human beings, will be complex and uncertain, but we must start getting a handle on uses and implications of the technology now; the world is changing fast and it might not make sense for us to assign and then have students write a five paragraph essay in the same way anymore, much like it doesn’t make sense for most of us to grow all of our own food.