Ban ChatGPT in schools? Teachers and students should be encouraged to use it

AI tools are only going to improve, and they are going to be ubiquitous. Far better to learn how to make the best use of them.

- Sandra Davie

Recently, I received two e-mails on the use of ChatGPT in education. One was from a parent who was puzzled about the Ministry of Education's decision to allow the use of the much-talked about artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot in schools.

The mother of two, who caught her secondary school son and his friend using the AI tool to write a school essay, fears that students are likely to use ChatGPT to "cheat" in their school work and in the process, lose out on learning.

The other e-mail I received was from a junior college teacher who suspects that some of her students had used ChatGPT to write an essay she had set them.

She said her students "were clever enough to hide it well" and she needed to start looking at tools that can help her detect if they had used ChatGPT.

"On top of everything I do, do I now need to worry about Al-generated homework?" she asked.

These are legitimate questions about the ethics of using Al-powered bots.

We know that GPT is the ultimate cheating tool - the AI language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poems, generate code and plan vacations.

GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can respond even to images and pass the bar exam for lawyers.

And some of the current tools to detect plagiarism do not work with ChatGPT, which produces "original" content - in that it does not simply regurgitate other material online.

The bot has also raised existential worries among people in different professions, including school teachers. One teacher, who used it to write a lesson plan, said the bot had provided a detailed and useful lesson plan on a topic she intended to teach.

She wondered if AI will soon be able to teach her JC students current affairs topics for General Paper.