Welcome to Education Matters. I falsified my letter to the editor. This is what you are reading now. I am very sorry.
Look, I didn’t mean to do this, but the magazine thing is they have a really hard deadline, and if you miss it, you’re left with blank pages. So when I found out I only had a few hours left to finish this, well, I was shocked.
And then I did what more and more of us do: I turned to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s massively mind-ing generative AI software, to help me. After training in some of my previous jobs, I asked about the use of AI in education.
AI is already doing great things in education. By crunching vast amounts of data on student performance, AI algorithms can tailor instruction to the needs of students, which means huge improvements in student outcomes. Chatbots and virtual assistants can provide help and feedback to students on the spot. Who needs a babysitter when you have an intelligent assistant?
But here’s where things get really interesting: language models like ChatGPT can generate human-like text, making them perfect for a whole range of educational applications. These models can create interactive learning materials such as chatbots that answer students’ questions or create personalized questions. You can generate complex articles, reports on datasets, or even summaries of full essays and research papers.
There are certainly some challenges as well. One of the biggest concerns is the risk of bias in the algorithm. We need to make sure these algorithms are designed and tested in a way that ensures all students get a fair shake. Another, of course, is the potential for deception.
But the bottom line is that AI and language models like ChatGPT are going to change the way we think about education and we need to make sure we’re using these tools ethically, fairly and effectively.
So are the previous four paragraphs, generated by chatgpt and lightly edited by me, ethical? If they are presented as my own work without being clearly identified, I would argue that the answer is no. And in fact with With disclosure like this, we’re still in a bit of a gray area—there are all sorts of questions about everything from slander to accuracy and the data these models are trained on.
The reality is that we are in a completely new place when it comes to using AI in education, and it is not clear what that means. The world has changed, and there is no going back.
As our AI Senior Editor William Douglas Haven makes clear in this issue’s cover story, technologies like ChatGPT will have all kinds of truly valuable and transformative applications in the classroom. Yes, they are definitely used for cheating too. But instead of trying to use such technologies, it is short-sighted to banish them from the classroom. Rohan Mehtam, a 17-year-old high school student in Pennsylvania, made a similar argument, suggesting that the way forward starts with building students’ confidence in experimenting with the device.
Meanwhile, Arian Kameneh takes us to a classroom in Denmark where students are using mood-management apps as the country continues to experience high levels of depression among young people. You’ll also get a story from Moira Donovan about how AI is being used to analyze and understand centuries-old texts, transforming humanities research in the process. Joy Lisi Rankin dives into the long history of the learn-to-code movement and the evolution of diversity and inclusion. And please don’t miss the story of Susie Cagle’s California school, which reinforced its facilities to put out the fires instead of forcing students to try to flee the wildfires and learn from that experience.
Indeed, we hope you will read it and think about it. And as always, I want to hear your opinion. You can even use chatgpit to generate it—I don’t mind.
Thank you,
Matt
@mat/mat.honan@technologyreview.com
