ChatGPT Has Entered the Classroom

The Al chatbot has stoked fears of an educational apocalypse. Some teachers see it as a sorely needed reboot.

- By Pia Ceres

When high school English teacher Kelly Gibson first encountered ChatGPT in December, existential anxiety kicked in fast. While the internet delighted in the chatbot's superficially sophisticated answers to users' prompts, educators like Gibson were less amused. If anyone could ask ChatGPT to "write 300 words on what the green light symbolizes in The Great Gatsby," what would stop students from feeding their homework to the bot? Speculation swirled about a new era of rampant cheating and a death knell for essays, even education itself. "I thought, 'Oh my God, this is literally what I teach," Gibson says.

But amid the panic, some enterprising teachers began to see ChatGPT as an opportunity to redesign what learning looks like. After her initial alarm, Gibson became one of them. She spent her winter break tinkering with the bot and figuring out ways to work it into her lessons. Gibson, who has been teaching for 25 years, came to view ChatGPT more along the lines of familiar tech tools that enhance, not replace, learning and critical thinking. "I don't know how to do it well yet, but I want AI chatbots to become like calculators for writing," she says.

Gibson's view of the technology as a teaching tool instead of the perfect cheat brings up a crucial point: Despite ChatGPT's ability to spew humanlike text, it is not intelligent in the way people are. It is a statistical machine that can regurgitate or create falsehoods, and it often needs guidance to get things right.