I suspect not all of Quair readers will know much about ChatGPT, the latest development in artificial intelligence. Neither did l until l took time to investigate and until l heard Bill Gates saying that it was as pioneering as the first PC.
In brief, ChatGPT can provide detailed answers to all our human questions and, 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. Frightening, and, while I daresay it will prove highly beneficial to various aspects of scientific and economic development, it is, in my view, a real threat to learning.
As a former teacher (some colleagues tell me I have never left that profession!), 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 resilience. If something does the thinking for you, it removes the process of inquiry and, it makes the student (and worse still the teacher) lazy.
I can’t deny I might have liked the idea of ChatGPT when I 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 I don’t think it will be long before 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 the danger is exacerbated with ChatGPT.
So, does this make me a Luddite? Possibly, but I 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 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.
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 partly because more parents have become estranged from their children’s learning and upbringing, we should be wary. The trouble is that AI does not teach all the other skills necessary to understand humanity. It might 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 I will react when my crampons unexpectedly break or I find I have left my lunch back at the hostel. Food for thought.
My Moray House 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. I can’t help wondering how Moray House and its equivalents will cope with ChatGPT. All I can say, is good luck to the teachers of the future!
