By Greg Gutkowski – Educators face a very important and interesting challenge regarding ChatGPT. Do we embrace it? If so, how? Do we fight it? If so, why?
ChatGPT, and soon many other alternative AI-based chatbots, can write an essay on any topic, a summary of a long article, a book or thesis outline, a cover letter for a job search, a LinkedIn profile, a thank you note for attending a graduation ceremony, automatic customer service follow up email, as well as blogs and social media posts with specified keywords. It has just been introduced to the public in November of 2022.
ChatGPT can determine the sentiment of a given piece of text. It can write on any subject in various styles. Here are examples of 3 short passages written by ChatGPT on the same subject of infatuation. The first style is Shakespearean, the second is medical, and the third is urban youth.
1. “Oh, how my heart doth ache and flutter at the thought of her! Her beauty hath ensnared me, captured my soul, and enslaved my mind. I am bewitched, entranced, enamored.”
2. “Infatuation is a type of romantic attraction characterized by intense feelings of passion, fascination, and idealization towards another person. It is believed to be related to the release of neurochemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, and adrenaline in the brain, which contribute to feelings of pleasure and reward.”
3. “Yo, I’m so whipped man. I can’t stop thinking about this girl. She’s just so freakin’ gorgeous and funny and smart. I’m just, like, head over heels for her, you know?”
ChatGPT can carry a voice conversation if equipped with voice-to-text and text-to-voice capabilities. As such is an ideal tool for call centers providing customer service. It can translate as well as detect many languages. It can form a hypothesis and provide suggestions on the data to be collected in verifying such a hypothesis.
It is very efficient with respect to competitive research (list the top 5 manufacturers of product A, and show their competitors and their URLs). It is quite good in keyword searches for SEO.
Last but not least, it can answer questions taken from the United States Medical Licensing Exam. Here is a fragment of the abstract of research regarding this topic:
“ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialized training or reinforcement. Additionally, ChatGPT demonstrated a high level of concordance and insight in its explanations. These results suggest that large language models may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making.” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.19.22283643v2
Translation: If ChatGPT can pass Medical Licensing Exam it should be able to pass CPA and Bar Exams.
I am all for embracing this technology as it makes students much more productive in research, learning, and writing. However, it is easy for me to say as I teach digital marketing and business analytics where such capabilities are relatively easy to incorporate into the curriculum. Marketing students just need to know how to use ChatGPT and similar technologies to quickly write SEO-optimized blogs and social media posts based on a keyword and competitive searches provided by the same ChatGPT.
However, I would not be sure about the best way to embrace this powerful technology if I were an English writing teacher. Would I accept an essay or paper written by ChatGPT? Is it the student’s own work or plagiarism?
This reminds me of a debate regarding the use of calculators. For example, do we need to teach students to multiply double-digit numbers by hand when calculators are omnipresent and minimize the likelihood of making mistakes?
Writing is not that easy. Writing is more ambiguous, creative, and subjective. It has a rhythm, conveys sentiments, and has various levels of sophistication depending on the education level of the intended audience.
ChatGPT is pretty good at providing answers to ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ but it is very limited in answering ‘why’ questions. Maybe this is the direction where we need to shift our writing education i.e, concentrate on critical thinking and save time and energy on the mechanics of research and actual writing.
A good example of using ChatGPT would be a debate. Students can prepare themselves very quickly and effectively but they will be graded on the quality of presenting and refuting their respective arguments.
Another example would be to write a paper on a topic and present the summary to the class in person. The paper will not be graded, but the oral presentation will get feedback and evaluation.
ChatGPT is only as good as the available underlying data published on the Internet. Therefore, it is of no use when writing a proposal for new product features or a manual on how to operate any new complicated equipment. Maybe we need to teach more technical writing as ChatGPT is irrelevant in these cases.
Ignoring this technology in teaching writing, and education, in general, seems to be impossible. However, what is the best way to embrace it?
I think we are all learning as we go… Just like with countless technologies before – Gutenberg print press, switching to cars from horses, watching TV instead of reading, getting news from social media versus the traditional media, smartphones eliminating landlines, GPS versus traditional maps, texting versus emailing, to name a few. At the beginning of each technological shift mentioned above, many people could not envision the benefits or pitfalls of new technologies.