ChatGPT, positioned to disrupt education?

Yes disruptive, but not as disruptive as the media has positioned it.

What it has caused recently is a lot of discussion about how it can seamlessly write essays and pass tests with very little issues.  The last time something like this has created this much engagement in education was the mobile phone. ChatGPT has definitely stirred up a lot of interest!

What does GPT mean?  It stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT). Essentially ChatGPT is a language processing system that has already received training, through an autoregressive model, for it to respond in a logical consistent way.  

However, consistent does not mean predictable. After playing around with ChatGPT, it does some pretty unexpected creative responses, such as referencing articles that do not exist or, for the real adventurous, suggest a cooking recipe that has never been tried before. It is pretty entertaining.

What is less entertaining though are the reports that ChatGPT will remove the need for students to write their own work as it can fabricate essay writing quite easily. In short, the concern is students will use it to pass its writing as their own work. A valid concern. I can see how a student would find that attractive as the work appears to be original and not copied from a source (i.e. article, book, website, etc.). At first glance, the composition does look well organized and written.

So the question is can a system detect ChatGPT composition?   

An article from Medium written by Karan Purohit, wrote that "the problem with Autoregressive Language Model is that it only can use forward context or backward context, which means it can’t use forward and backward context at the same time, thereby being limited in its understanding of context, and prediction". Based on this it will be possible to detect ChatGPT. There are already reports of applications, such as Turnitin and ZeroGPT, that can confidently identify it.  As long as educators continue to practice the use of plagiarism software with their students, ChatGPT will eventually be detected along with any other plagiarized articles, periodicals, books, etc.

The design of assignment can also manage the authentic work. In a previous post, Capacity to manage change with Learning Technologies and the rebirth of Draftback, the process of having students present their work in stages can also help ensure their writing remains authentic. However, another concern with ChatGPT is a semantic one. The ideas and facts that it generates are very fast and can generate these ideas into an essay very easily.  

It is like Wikipedia but a bespoke on demand version of one.

Similar to when students use a source like Wikipedia; they need to learn to fact check things and reference the source. A good way to message this is like any outside source, just reference it.  Because it is so accessible to get ideas and information, the challenge will be to not take ideas without crediting them. Students will need guidance, especially since this technology is so dynamic and different from other online sources. 

Within education, I see this technology will make a positive impact in assistive learning. Amid the negative press and crackdown, a group in Australia sees the merits of ChatGPT as Assistive Technology. Similar to A.I. voice to text and word prediction tools, ChatGPT will help students express their ideas in writing and illustrate the proper sentence syntax to express this idea. It will improve their independence and bring an equity with identified needs, such as Dyslexia with syntactic awareness, Wernicke’s aphasia or a Written Expression Disorder.  It will be interesting to see if this type of A.I. technology will be accepted as an assistive learning technology.

Lastly as an educator, it is imperative to model the appropriate use of technology.  In the case of ChatGPT, if one uses it for proposals, letters of recommendation (yes, those dreaded recommendation letters), or emails it needs to be referenced and credit needs to be given. If we expect students to use it responsibly we should as well.

It will be interesting to see where it leads... I may even see how it can write a blog article for another day.  

Update: After attending an online panel discussion on ChatGPT through the Conference of Independent Schools, it was heartening that all of the education leaders on the Panel are excited by this new technology. The creators of ZeroGPT attended the discussion as well. They see it as transformative while being explicit that it is a tool to assist with academic honesty and to help make students better writers.