Know-it-all chatbots arrived last year with a bang, convincing one engineer that machines had become sentient, spreading fear that industries could be wiped out, and instilling fear of a cheating epidemic in schools and universities.
ChatGPT, an easy-to-use artificial intelligence tool trained on billions of words and tonnes of data from the web, has sparked outrage among educators in recent weeks.
It can write a half-decent essay and respond to many common classroom questions, igniting a heated debate about the future of traditional education.
Because of "concerns about negative impacts on student learning," New York City's education department banned ChatGPT from its networks.
Because of "concerns about negative effects on student learning," New York City's education department banned ChatGPT from its networks.
"While the tool may provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills," department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said.
A group of Australian universities has announced plans to change exam formats in order to eliminate the use of AI tools, which they consider to be outright cheating.
Some educators, however, are less concerned about using AI in the classroom, and some even see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. This is due in part to the fact that ChatGPT in its current form still makes mistakes.
For example, it believes Guatemala is larger than Honduras. It's not.
In addition, ambiguous questions can derail the process. When asked to describe the Battle of Amiens, the tool will provide a passable detail or two on the 1918 World War I clash.
However, it fails to mention that a skirmish of the same name occurred in 1870. It takes several prompts for it to realize its mistake.
"ChatGPT is an important innovation, but no more so than calculators or text editors," said Antonio Casilli, a French author and educator. "ChatGPT can assist people who are stressed by a blank sheet of paper in writing a first draught, but they still have to write and style it afterward."
University of Nantes researcher Olivier Ertzscheid agreed that teachers should focus on the positives. In any case, he told AFP, high school students were already using ChatGPT, and any ban would only make it more appealing.
Instead, he believes that teachers should "experiment with the limits" of AI tools by creating texts and analyzing the results with their students.
However, there is another major reason to believe that educators do not need to panic just yet.
AI writing tools have long been at odds with programs designed to detect them, and ChatGPT is no exception.
A few weeks ago, an amateur programmer announced that he had spent his new year's vacation developing an app that could analyze texts and determine whether they were written by ChatGPT.
"There's so much chatbot hype going around," Edward Tian wrote on Twitter. "Is AI responsible for this and that? We, as humans, have a right to know!"
His app, GPTZero, is not the first and is unlikely to be the last in the field.
Furthermore, OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, stated that it was already working on a "statistical watermark" prototype. This implies that teachers will be fine in the long run.
However, Casilli, for one, believes that the impact of such tools has a significant symbolic significance. According to him, it partially changed the rules of the game in which teachers ask their students questions.
The student now questions the machine before going over everything in the output.
"Every time new tools appear, we worry about potential abuses, but we've also found ways to use them in our teaching," Casilli explained.
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