Calculators of the AI Age: How Educators Can Transform ChatGPT from Cheating Aid to Learning Tool
With many teachers completely eradicating AI tools from the classroom in fear of cheating, students are missing out on an opportunity to discover how to leverage these algorithms of the future.
ChatGPT and its Overwhelming Ubiquity
In late November of 2022, OpenAI released a potent new Large Language Model (LLM) to the public. Since then, ChatGPT has touched all of our lives. Whether you’ve utilized it personally or not, there’s a high likelihood that you’ve read something written by ChatGPT or seen an advertisement campaign that used its extensive knowledge base. If you’ve ever used it, you won’t be surprised by this. Its breadth of knowledge and the swiftness with which it can articulate that knowledge is well beyond any humans.
Given all this, ChatGPT has raised apprehensions among our educators as a potential instrument to cheat on essays and other writing assignments. However, this mindset may lead to educators missing out on an opportunity to add another tool to their students’ toolboxes.
In today’s world, the importance of understanding AI is increasing rapidly. Many jobs once thought immune to automation are now at risk of being replaced by AI. To ensure that future generations are prepared for the job market, teaching them how to interact with and utilize these tools is invaluable.
The Calculator of an AI Age
Think back to elementary school and the multiplication quizzes where inevitably, a pupil would question, “Why do I have to learn this if I always have a calculator in my pocket?” Now, of course, it is paramount for students to not only understand fundamental mathematics but also to be able to perform these rudimentary operations quite quickly in their heads. Despite this, once students have worked up to more complex mathematics, we expect them to always have a calculator on hand. Of course, they aren’t always allowed to use it, but we go so far as to teach them how to use some of the more advanced features you can find on graphing calculators. This is incredibly relevant because it demonstrates how we can take something like a calculator or AI that might seem like a way to cheat when learning the basics but can instead be used as a tool for students to access when working on more complex tasks.
The Challenges of AI and How They Benefit Students
Some of the shortcomings of large language models also provide excellent opportunities to teach students essential skills. For example, LLMs can sometimes provide false information. These occurrences, often called hallucinations, can be problematic when applying AI writing to practical applications. However, if we teach students to use AI to write, we can also teach them how to go back and verify that all the elements of their writing are correct. This is highly applicable when using AI but is also helpful for verifying the accuracy of someone else’s writing or even their own.
Telling an LLM what to write can also be more of a challenge than one might expect. While you could just give it the prompt and hope it does a good job, more often than not, there are more requirements than just answering a prompt. For example, many projects require a specific format, tone, and complexity. Integrating all this into a single prompt is more of an art form than a science. Teaching students this skill will better prepare them for a world where these tools are more common.
It’s also important to remember that while LLMs may create falsehoods, they still can be integral in guiding what subtopics may be relevant for students to research using more traditional channels. For example, if you’re doing a project on nuclear energy, you may want to ask what relevant points or events you should target during your research to ensure you are well-prepared for your paper.
More Than a Writing Aid
While many of these ideas focus on ideas related to writing assignments, there are other ways AI can be utilized in the classroom. For example, chatbots like chatgpt have become incredibly skilled at writing code, whether highly generic code in common programming languages like Python or even very niche and nuanced plugins for other applications. This has increased the ability of people with minimal coding experience to create anything from a script to automate a task all the way up to a website or even an application.
Teachers can even teach students to use AI to assist them in other everyday tasks they may need to perform. For example, given today’s job market, we must provide our students with every possible advantage. Why not teach our students how they can leverage AI to find improvements for their job resumes? (make sure to follow for an in-depth guide on how AI can be utilized for this purpose)
In Conclusion
Given this, it becomes clear that if our goal in schooling is to prepare students for their future and we accept the ever-increasing part AI will play in that future, we only do students a disservice by not implementing it for some assignments. However, just like in the case of the calculator, it is essential to recognize that we need to teach students how to perform these tasks on their own before we can teach them how to automate some of them. Even then, applying this to all assignments isn’t wise. A better implementation may allow students to use AI for specific steps in the writing process. For example, students could write an essay where they can use AI to help exclusively with their research for the paper. For the next writing assignment, they could use AI to help organize the paper. Then to help students practice prompting, the next project may involve having AI completely write the essay.
As long as educators remain conscious of which parts of the assignment were done by AI while grading, this could effectively teach students how AI can be integrated into their standard workflows to various degrees, depending on the task required. This would be a clear advantage for students who will be coming out of school just in time to enter a world that is increasingly driven by AI.
If you enjoyed this article, please let me know by leaving a clap or a comment! If you’d like to see more content like this, please check out my profile or leave a follow. Thanks!
