The US’s largest education department just blocked ChatGPT
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Students and teachers in New York City schools are no longer able to access ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text generation language model, for fear it would “mark the end of high school English.”
As reported by chalk stroke (opens in new tab)Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for NYC’s Department of Education, claimed that “negative impacts on student learning and concerns about content accuracy and safety” prompted the ban.
Simply put, the local education authority is concerned that students will use the artificially intelligent ChatGPT to write their graded work for them, making it unlikely they will engage with the material, and making it more difficult for those grading the work to distinguishable from work written entirely by a human being.
ChatGPT and the ‘threat’ to education
Teachers are also concerned about the risk of ChatGPT serving incorrect information to students, but this may be less problematic than the potential for AI to offensive and racist content (opens in new tab).
On that basis alone, it makes sense for ChatGPT to be filtered for content, but the argument that ChatGPT is single-handedly destroying high school humanities, as suggested by a teacher in The Atlantic Ocean (opens in new tab) in December 2022, could be somewhat hyperbolic.
It’s true that ChatGPT is an absolute mockery of the way the humanities are currently run – and makes short work of the strict, formal ways students are taught to write at both the high school and undergraduate levels.
However, to say that “High School English”, or the humanities in general, is under huge threat, assumes there is only one way to teach those subjects, and vastly overstates its current value to students.
When high school students are so unmotivated about the subject at hand that they are driven to leave AI writers doing the work instead of participating should set alarm bells ringing for educators, not that their system is crumbling, but that the system was never fit for use in the first place.
Robert Pondiscio, a Senior Fellow for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), argued in a opinion piece (opens in new tab) in December 2022 that the goal of secondary education is to achieve “language skills”, rather than struggle with knowledge. He argues that the threat of AI to education is exaggerated because AI produces work that students could never fully comprehend, “let alone dismiss it as their own.”
In short, he believes that work produced by AI is not fit for purpose in an educational environment.
In the same month, Peter Greene, another English teacher, argued much the same Forbes (opens in new tab)suggesting that teachers run their command prompts through ChatGPT, and if the response is a good, credible piece of work, then the command should be “refined, reworked, or just scrapped.”
A stubborn unwillingness to change the way students are taught rather than fear AI will also show up in higher education.
If undergraduate students prefer to use AI rather than engage with their ideas, perhaps higher education institutions should consider whether they can offer something of value, when the structures for grappling with knowledge and ideas can be circumvented by a readily available language model.
The fact that students are willing to do this despite stepping into the process should show that higher education is a stagnant job mill, with students there to receive the piece of paper at the end. It shows, but no one at the top wants to listen.