The challenge to education from ChatGPT
Just a few months ago, I knew virtually nothing about ChatGPT, the latest development in artificial intelligence. Whilst l had heard colleagues talking what the “chatbot age” might do to their children, it was only when I heard Bill Gates saying that it was as pioneering a technological invention as the first PC, that I began to take a serious interest. Effectively, he was telling us that we better get used to it because it will completely change our lives. At that looks certain to be the case especially with the news that Google is getting ready to launch its own model Bard AI.
ChatGPT is designed to provide detailed answers to all our human questions, so, in schools, colleges and universities, it can be used to write essays and do all kinds of traditional course work. No more “surfing” the Internet - just ask ChatGPT to do the work for you. While l dare say it will prove highly beneficial to various aspects of scientific and economic development, it is, in my view, a real threat to some aspects of the process of learning. So I am not at all surprised to hear that many across our educational institutions are very wary of its increasing presence.
Before I became an elected politician in 2007, I was a secondary school teacher. As such, I was always just as interested in how we use knowledge rather than in the knowledge itself.
Education should always be about developing inquiring minds and building resilience. If something does the thinking for you however, it will almost certainly make the student (and possibly the teacher) lazy.
I can’t deny that l might have liked the idea of ChatGPT when l was at school - helping with that troublesome essay or a differential calculus solution, or maybe even calculating a Duckworth Lewis score on the cricket field, but l don’t think it will be long before serious problems occur especially as ChatGPT has sometimes been found to fail. Apparently it “hallucinates” when it makes up false facts and so there is no guarantee of infallibility. That, of course, is true of the Internet and many other modern teaching aids but I think the danger is exacerbated with ChatGPT. This is because it further undermines the process of intellectual inquiry.
I also worry about the danger that young people will transfer the trust they have, or should have, in their teachers to AI. Why bother to listen to a teacher when you can get answers more easily from AI? In an age when we are seeing increasing indiscipline in our schools and more parents finding they have become estranged from their children’s learning we should be wary.
The trouble is that AI does not teach all the other skills necessary to understand human relationships. It might help to navigate me to the top of Ben Nevis without me using a map or compass or an iPhone but it will certainly not tell me everything l need to know about the experience; how l will interact with my climbing colleagues, how I will react when my crampons unexpectedly break or l find l have left my lunch back at the hostel. Food for thought because these human learning experiences are just as important as my technical ability to climb a mountain.
So, does this make me a Luddite? Possibly, but l still hold to the very strong view that the richness in human potential is often enhanced when we have to cope with failure or criticism or finding out we have gone down the wrong track, and, just as importantly, why. We learn from experience and yes, from the mistakes we make. Plato’s Socratic discourses, Hegel’s dialectic and Hobbes’ observations on life outside society as being “nasty, brutish and short” should all warn us not to completely supplant human imagination and creativity with technology.
My teacher training was not the best year of my life because it was so far removed from the reality of the classroom. The only thing that mattered far more than getting to add Dip Ed to the MA after my name were the 12 weeks of teaching practice in a school and learning whether you could both cope and flourish in the profession. That was a very human process which gave me the skills not just for the rest of my career in teaching and in politics but for rest of my life. I can’t help wondering what teacher training colleges are telling today’s students about how to cope with ChatGPT. All I can say, is good luck to the teachers of the future!
Liz Smith is a Conservative Member of the Scottish Parliament for Mid Scotland and Fife. She currently serves as Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy.
