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This is a shame. If educators actively engage with students about the technology’s potential and limitations and work with them to broadly define new academic standards—ChatGPT and generative AI—they can democratize and innovate K-12 education on an unprecedented scale.
A bold claim, I know. But a few months after putting generative AI to the test (the nerdy disease if you will), Exhibit A? College applications.
Applying to college these days is as mentally draining as it gets, and as I tackled more of my essays, the promise of using ChatGPT as a real-time editor was appealing—partly as a productivity boost, but mostly as a distraction.
I had ChatGPT carefully evaluate my use of semicolons and grade my text on a scale of 0-10 (the results were wrong and crazy).2And even role-play as an admissions counselor. The advice was fundamentally inconsistent with the creative demands of modern college essays, and I mostly ignored it. But even if it was on a machine, he said, “The act of talking out loud helped me figure out what I wanted to say next.” Using ChatGPT to verbalize the space of opportunities from the scale of words to paragraphs has strengthened my own thinking. And I’ve experienced the same thing in every domain I’ve applied to, from generating fifth grader-level explanations of French pluperfect to breaking down the Latin names of human muscles.
It all adds up to a simple but profound fact: anyone with an Internet connection now has a private tutor without the costs associated with private tutoring. Sure, he’s an easily embarrassed, slightly delusional tutor, but a teacher nonetheless. The impact of this is difficult to quantify, and is appropriate in large public school classrooms where students struggle for individual attention in impoverished communities with inadequate educational infrastructure. As the psychologist Benjamin Bloom showed in the early 1980s, one-on-one instruction to mastery allowed almost all students to exceed the class average by two standard deviations (“about 90% … reached the standard … only the top 20% reached it”).
ChatGPT certainly can’t replicate human interaction, but even its staunchest critics have to admit that it’s a step in the right direction on that front. Maybe 1% of students use it this way and maybe half as effective as a human tutor, but even with these low numbers, the potential to democratize access to education is huge. I would go so far as to say that if ChatGPT had been around during the outbreak, many students would have been left behind.
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