So I stirred up a bit of conversation on Twitter last week when I noted that I had already been handed ChatGPT produced assignments.1 For those who are unaware, ChatGPT is an ‘AI’ chatbot that given a prompt can produce texts; it is one of most sophisticated bots of this sort yet devised, trained on a massive amount of writing (along with substantial human input in the training process, something we’ll come back to). And its appearance has made a lot of waves and caused a fair bit of consternation.
Now I should note at the outset that while I am going to argue that ChatGPT is – or at least ought to be – basically useless for doing college assignments, it is also wrong to use it for this purpose. Functionally all university honor codes prohibit something like ‘unauthorized aid or assistance’ when completing an assignment. Having a chatbot write an assignment – or any part of that assignment – for you pretty clearly meets that definition. Consequently using ChatGPT on a college essay is pretty clearly an impermissible outside aid – that is to say, ‘cheating.’ At most universities, this sort of cheating is an offense that can lead to failing classes or expulsion. So however irritating that paper may be, it is probably not worth getting thrown out of college, money wasted, without a degree. Learn. Don’t cheat.
That said I want to move through a few of my basic issues: first, what ChatGPT is in contrast to what people seem to think it is. Second, why I think that functionality serves little purpose in essay writing – or more correctly why I think folks that think it ‘solves’ essay writing misunderstand what essay writing is for. Third, why I think that same functionality serves little purpose in my classroom – or more correctly why I think that folks that think is solves issues in the classroom fundamentally misunderstand what I am teaching and how.
Now I do want to be clear at the outset that I am not saying that this technology has no viable uses (though I can’t say I’ve yet seen an example of a use I would consider good rather than merely economically viable for ChatGPT in particular) and I am certainly not saying that future machine-learning based products, be they large language models or other products, will not be useful (though I do think that boosters of this technology frequently assume applications in fields they do not understand). Machine learning products are, in fact, already useful and in common use in ways that are good. But I think I will stipulate that much of the boosterism for ChatGPT amounts to what Dan Olsen (commenting on cryptocurrency) describes as, “technofetishistic egotism,” a condition in which tech creators fall into the trap where, “They don’t understand anything about the ecosystems they’re trying to disrupt…and assume that because they understand one very complicated thing, [difficult programming challenges]…that all other complicated things must be lesser in complexity and naturally lower in the hierarchy of reality, nails easily driven by the hammer that they have created.”
Of course that goes both ways which is why I am not going to say what capabilities machine learning may bring tomorrow. It is evidently a potentially powerful technology and I am not able to assess what it may be able to do in the future. But I can assess the observes capabilities of ChatGPT right now and talk about the implication those capabilities have in a classroom environment, which I do understand.2 That means – and I should be clear on this – this is a post about the capabilities of ChatGPT in its current form; not some other machine learning tool or AI that one imagines might exist in the future. And in that context what I see does not convince me that this technology is going to improve the learning experience; where it is disruptive it seems almost entirely negatively so and even then the disruption is less profound than one might think.
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