ChatGPT has commanded the world’s attention in recent weeks, and it has educators and policymakers discussing its implications for education, academic honesty, accessibility, and more.
OpenAI’s chatbot can compose poems, can write an essay about global warming as a Taylor Swift song, and can call up HTML code instantly–the possibilities are nearly endless.
ChatGPT is not the only AI-powered chatbot available to students and educators (0ther options include Google’s Bard and the latest version of Microsoft’s Bing), but it certainly seems to be the most discussed.
Chatbots raise specific concerns in education–will students use them to cheat? Where is the line between research and plagiarism? What role do chatbots play in creating more accessible educational tools for students with diverse needs? Here are five things to ponder as tools such as ChatGPT become more prominent in learning:
1. ChatGPT has rapidly begun to infiltrate K-12 classrooms nationwide. A recent survey by study.com found that nearly 90 percent of students admitted to using OpenAI’s chatbot in some home-related capacity, and more than 25 percent of teachers have already caught a student cheating using the chatbot. The propensity for students to use ChatGPT to cheat has raised concern amongst educators and even prompted several school districts, ranging from New York City Public Schools to the Los Angeles Unified School District, to issue a ban of the chatbot. However, cheating with ChatGPT is just a symptom of a larger problem in education: a focus on rote memorization and regurgitation of information.
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