What Is This CHATGPT That Is Giving Headaches to Educators Worldwide?

Last November, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk, launched ChatGPT. Have you heard of it? If you haven’t accessed this platform yet, pay attention to the following text.
What is ChatGPT?
In a few words, ChatGPT is a platform that allows users to establish a “dialogue” through text with an artificial intelligence capable of responding to questions with fairly accurate and complete (written) answers. The tool is based on GPT-3 technology, which extensively scanned the Internet and developed the ability to write seemingly anything – tweets, poems, essays, and even computer programs.
Let’s look at an example:
User question: Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the USA in 2015
ChatGPT’s (impartial) response: This question is a bit complicated because Christopher Columbus died in 1506, so he could not have come to the USA in 2015.
Are the answers 100% reliable?
Of course not! Especially since the technology is still evolving. As the database was created during 2020 and 2021, sometimes the app gives outdated responses. It has also shown errors when answering math problems and has written misspelled words.
Who is behind this application?
OpenAI, a research lab based in San Francisco. Among its founders and major current donors are Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Microsoft. Well-known previous products from OpenAI include DALL-E, which creates images from textual descriptions.
What is the controversy behind this tool?
Besides giving headaches to competitors like Google, ChatGPT is worrying and challenging educators worldwide. Why? The answer is simple: as soon as the platform was launched, students immediately learned to use the system for their school activities.
Teachers and school administrators have been struggling to “catch” students using the tool to “cheat” and are concerned about the damage ChatGPT can cause to their teaching plans and students’ school lives.
Some schools have responded to ChatGPT by suppressing it. Public schools in New York City, for example, recently blocked access to ChatGPT on school computers and networks, citing “concerns about negative impacts on student learning and concerns about the safety and accuracy of the content.” Schools in other American cities, including Seattle, have also restricted access.
In Australia, the popularization of ChatGPT necessitated a complete review of the assessment methods for 2023 among the group of leading research universities in the country.
In London, one of the alternatives considered is to deprive students of internet access during exams or even to remodel assessments.
It is easy to understand why educators feel threatened. ChatGPT is an extremely capable tool that emerged out of nowhere, without warning, and performs reasonably well, promising to evolve over time. Concerns about ethical issues, whether the answers provided by ChatGPT are accurate, and especially whether students are truly learning, only add to the many concerns that teachers and the educational system already face.
Is banning ChatGPT from classrooms the best solution?
One thing is certain: this type of technology is here to stay. Moreover, even if schools prevent students from accessing the tool on school computers, they have phones, laptops, and various other means of access outside the classroom.
Instead, why not adopt ChatGPT as a teaching aid? – one that can unlock student creativity, offer personalized lessons, and better prepare students to work alongside artificial intelligence systems?
Will it take more work than banning it? Without a doubt! New lesson plans, new rules, and new systems will be necessary.
Sudden technological changes are rarely easy to adjust to. But who better to guide students in this new world of artificial intelligence than their teachers?