A singer from the 1960s used to say that freedom begins with prohibition.
Earlier this year, New York State banned the use of Chat GPT in schools and colleges to prevent its use in exams.
The head of state education made a number of statements on the matter. These are the main reasons for this decision:
- They are concerned about the negative impact on pupils’ learning.
- They consider that the contents will be less accurate than when using a non-artificial source.
- Artificial Intelligence does not help critical thinking, nor does it strengthen students’ problem-solving skills.
I can more or less agree with these statements, but do we really believe that prohibition is the solution?
These students will leave class, and at home they will use Chat GPT to do their homework.
Wouldn’t it be better to teach them how to use it in the best way, and above all, won’t we have to help them develop the skills they need to bring out its full potential?
It seems to me that banning all the technological disruptions that arise is like trying to put gates on the field. It seems to me a much better option to teach students how to integrate the tool into their learning processes, to make them more productive and above all to focus on the most valuable tasks. And I apply the same to the professional environment, Chat GPT can be an ally to develop low-value tasks, so that we can dedicate ourselves to what the AI is not capable of doing, at least for now.
What skills would students need to develop?
Ability to synthesise to get ChatGPT requests right. When my son was little, he would do Google searches with endless sentences, using nouns and articles, and no question marks.
What happens if you search with longer texts? The result is usually not 100% correct, and you spend more time in locating valuable content.
Children need to be taught to identify and use keywords, to improve their search skills in order to be more agile and find the most appropriate content.
With Chat GPT it will be the same, the better the result, the more focused your consultation will be.
Critical ability: What information is good and what should I discard? We have to help them to know how to select which content to use from all that Artificial Intelligence throws up. They should look for contrasting sources, on the Web or outside the Web, as books still exist in the 21st century.
It’s the same thing that happened years ago with the Wanderer’s Corner, there were teachers who were very quick to detect students who used other people’s work, because they didn’t change a single comma from the original work. That’s what they try to teach my son at school, that not everything on Wikipedia is true, and that they don’t have to copy and paste the text that appears in the first search engine entry. You have to develop their desire to investigate, and their critical capacity, so that they are able to know what is true and what is a fake.
Ability to create something new, to have a narrative.
We have to help them to tell stories, to use the content that AI throws at them and create something of their own.
You can make a deliverable using content from Chat GPT, but you can add value by developing the idea around which you are going to articulate the presentation. Copying and pasting is not going to differentiate you from the rest.
I certainly see it as a technology with great potential in our industry, there are many low value-added tasks that could be done more automatically using AI:
- Chatbot: to provide answers to learners in learning programmes on standard topics (technical questions, timetables, information about the programme, etc.). This question is repeated over and over again, and we always answer it with the same text.
- Generation of reinforcement content for the programmes.
- Summarise texts to extract key ideas.
- Learn a new subject of which you have no knowledge.
Something that has benefits we should try to integrate into our daily lives. Of course, banning it will only make students less willing to use the tool and, without help and guidance, the results will be worse.
Of course, the ban is a way of delaying something that will happen sooner rather than later.