The Potential and Pitfalls of ChatGPT in the Classroom

I’ve talked before about ChatGPT (just like virtually everyone else these days). In a relatively short period of time, the general tenor of the internet has gone from “OH MY GOD, IT’S THE DEATH OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY!THE MACHINES ARE COMING FOR US!” to “How to use ChatGPT to improve your love life” (no, I’m not kidding). As the wave of panic that inevitably arises any time some fancy new technology comes onto the scene subsides, people are coming to accept that AI language models are here to stay and have begun using them for just about everything you can imagine. This includes in the classrooms, as teachers accept that the cat is out of the bag with these programs, and, hey, they’re actually pretty useful. In this article, I’ll be discussing how ChatGPT and other AI technologies are likely to transform the field of education in the future, with consideration of the potential pros and cons of using AI in the classroom.

Let’s begin with the ways that AI is already being used by teachers in classrooms to facilitate learning. One of the most common applications has been as a teaching aid. Several instructors have reported assigning students essays, then running those same prompts through ChatGPT and having their students analyze the output. This can be used to illustrate the shortcomings of the technology in its present state (i.e. pointing out factual errors, misattributions, etc.), but also how essay writing can be improved past the basic level (at which ChatGPT definitely writes). 

ChatGPT can also serve as a dialogic learning aid for students. Unlike traditional search engines or resource articles, in which a topic has to be queried using key terms and then read about using informational sources, which may or may not be immediately pertinent to the interests and needs of the student, ChatGPT can render a response that is custom tailored to the exact question being posed by the student. This can save students a ton of time in hunting down the information they need and allow them to quickly drill down on the specifics. Jevin West, director of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, thinks such algorithms could prove useful in generating new scientific hypotheses and in helping kickstart the creative writing process (a use I can certainly attest to).

Some instructors are also optimistic that ChatGPT may even be able to make education more equitable. Dr Leah Henrickson, a lecturer at the University of Leeds, was quoted in a Business Insider article as saying: “I think there's a lot of potential for helping people express themselves in ways that they hadn’t necessarily thought about. This could be particularly useful for students who speak English as a second language, or for students who aren't used to the academic writing style.”

Student’s aren’t the only ones finding utility in these AI systems. Teachers have found that they can be useful for drafting exam questions, creating lesson plans, and writing example text. Basically, ChatGPT can filter out the low-level busy work, saving the teachers the trouble of having to generate materials from scratch and allowing them to focus on the more high-level elements. Lastly, programs like ChatGPT can help shine a light on ways that teaching itself can be improved. After all, if school assignments can be satisfactorily completed by a chatbot, perhaps that’s more a reflection on the quality of those assignments than of the AI. This can hopefully serve as a catalyst to get instructors to move away from testing memory and recall and trying to stimulate critical thinking and complex problem solving.

This highlights an important point to be made - a teachable moment, if you will: new technologies are often seen as disruptive, even cataclysmic. Once handheld calculators became widely available, teachers worried that their proliferation would spell the end of arithmetic learning. Of course, this concern was overblown; people today are just as bad at math as they’ve ever been, calculators or no. People often see innovations as rendering obsolete previous methods, which, to their minds, spells the end of life as we know it. This myopic perspective, however, fails to ask the obvious next question: what comes next? After all, history doesn’t simply stop once a problem has been solved or rendered moot. The horizon is a moving target. Instead of drawing the conclusion that the old ways are no longer necessary, and therefore the sky is about to fall, perhaps the more productive response is to ask what new opportunities do such innovations open up? Rather than worrying what no longer needs to be done, maybe we should ask what can be done that wasn’t possible before?

This isn’t to say, however, that there are no concerns whatsoever with using ChatGPT. Every opportunity has its cost; a car may be able to get you around faster than a bike, but if you don’t use it properly, it can also plow you into a telephone pole. First, there is, of course, the obvious potential for students to misuse ChatGPT in order to phone in their assignments, rather than actually learn and master the material. I’ve talked about this issue before, and how it’s largely overblown, but it isn’t non-existent. 

A more pertinent risk is if ChatGPT’s answers are taken uncritically. Returning to the example I gave of students using ChatGPT as an interactive information resource: ChatGPT can and will output flatly fallacious statements with a completely straight tone, and if these errors are not caught, it can lead to misinformation. This isn’t a risk to just students, but to anyone who uses the service without verifying the assertions being put forth. Basically, just as with any informational resource, fact checking is necessary. However, with ChatGPT, the risk of incorrect information is much higher than other resources such as Wikipedia. To quote Jevin West: “Would you use a calculator that made errors 10% to 15% of the time, without knowing where those errors are?” Moreover, just as ChatGPT can help level the academic playing field, it also has the potential to tilt it. For example, for students who lack internet access at home (an already existing problem), widespread incorporation of ChatGPT is likely to only further disadvantage them.

To conclude, no one needs to state how impactful ChatGPT has been; the fact that you can’t go a day without hearing about it is testament enough of that. This moment presents us with an opportunity to evolve the way we teach and learn, one that, if properly seized, can enhance both. But, one way or another, the train is here. We can either hop aboard or stand on the tracks.