Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat. To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms and other body parts; secreted pieces of paper; messages concealed in various vessels that may be smuggled into the hall.
In the fight against such cunning devilry, vigilant invigilators have pursued such efforts with eagle eyes, attempting to ensure the integrity of the exam answers. Of late, the broader role of invigilation has become more pertinent than ever, notably in the face of artificial intelligence technologies that seek to undermine the very idea of the challenging, individually researched answer.
ChatGPT, a language processing tool powered by comprehensive, deep AI technology, offers nightmares for instructors and pedagogues in spades. Myopic university managers will be slower to reach any coherent conclusions about this large language model (LLM), as they always are. But given the diminishing quality of degrees and their supposed usefulness, not to mention running costs and the temptations offered by educational alternatives, this will come as a particularly unwelcome headache.
For the student and anyone with an inner desire to labour less for larger returns, it is nothing less than a dream, a magisterial shortcut. Essays, papers, memoranda, and drafted speeches can all be crafted by this supercomputing wonder. It has already shaken educational establishments and even made Elon Musk predict that humanity was “not far from dangerously strong AI.”
Launched on November 30, 2022 and the creative offspring of AI research company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a work in progress, open to the curious, the lazy and the opportunistic. Within the first five days of launching, it had 1 million users on the books.
It did not take long for the chatbot to do its work. In January, the Manchester Evening News reported that a student by the name of Pieter Snepvangers had asked the bot to put together a 2,000-word essay on social policy. Within 20 minutes, the work was done. While not stellar, Snepvangers was informed by a lecturer that the essay could pass with a grade of 53. In the words of the instructor, “This could be a student who has attended classes and has engaged with the topic of the unit. The content of the essay, this could be somebody that’s been in my classes. It wasn’t the most terrible in terms of content.”
On receiving the assessment from the lecturer, Snepvangers could only marvel at what the site had achieved: “20 minutes to produce an essay which is supposed to demonstrate 12 weeks of learning. Not bad.”
The trumpets of doomsday have been sounded. Beverly Pell, an advisor on technology for children and a former teacher based in Irvine, California, saw few rays of hope with the arrival of the ChatGPT bot, notably on the issue of performing genuine research. “There’s a lot of cheap knowledge out there,” she told Forbes. “I think this could be a danger in education, and it’s not good for kids.”
Charging the barricades of such AI-driven knowledge forms tends to ignore the fundamental reality that the cheat or student assistance industry in education has been around for years. The armies of ghost writers scattered across the globe willing to receive money for writing the papers of others have not disappeared. The website stocked with readily minted essays has been ubiquitous.
More recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, online sites such as Chegg offer around the clock assistance in terms of homework, exam preparation and writing support. The Photomath app, to take another striking example, has seen over 300 million downloads since coming into use in 2014. It enables students to take a picture of their maths problems and seek answers.
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is also less than impressed by claims that ChatGPT is somehow bomb blowing in its effects. “In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative.” It was merely “well put together” and “nicely done.” Half a dozen startups, in addition to Google and Meta, were using “very similar technology” to OpenAI.
It is worth noting that universities, colleges and learning institutions constitute one aspect of the information cosmos that is ChatGPT. The chatbot continues to receive queries of varying degrees of banality. Questions range from astrology to suggest gift ideas to friends and family.
Then come those unfortunate legislators who struggle with the language of writing bills for legal passage. “When asked to write a bill for a member for Congress that would make changes to federal student aid programs,” writes Michael Brickman of the American Enterprise Institute, “ChatGPT produced one in seconds. When asked for Republican and Democrat amendments focused on consumer protection, it delivered a credible version that each party might conceivably offer.”
What are the options in terms of combating such usurping gremlins? For one, its gratis status is bound to change once the research phase is concluded. And, at least for the moment, the website has a service that occasionally overloads and impairs responses to questions users may pose. To cope with this, OpenAI created ChatGPT Plus, a plan that enables users to access material even during those rocky fluctuations.
Another relevant response is to keep a keen eye on the curriculum itself. In the words of Jason Wingard, a self-professed “global thought leader”, “The key to retaining the value of a degree from our institution is ensuring your graduates have the skills to change with any market. This means that we must tweak and adapt our curriculum at least every single year.” Wingard’s skills in global thought leadership do not seem particularly attuned to how university curricula, and incompetent reformers who insist on changing them, function.
There are also more rudimentary, logistical matters one can adopt. A return to pen and paper could be a start. Or perhaps the typewriter. These will be disliked and howled at by those narcotised by the screen, online solutions and finger tapping. But the modern educator will have to face facts. For all the remarkable power available through AI and machine related learning, we are also seeing a machine-automated form of unlearning, free of curiosity. Some branches off the tree of knowledge are threatening to fall off.
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We fought really hard to stop computers being the centre and people the dumb peripherals just feeding the system. IBM’s model was that — the computer directed workers. There is a usage for that model. But we successfully made computers the tools and people the users.
Now it is reversing. Big tech wants the users dumb again. They already play us through Google, Facebook, Amazon. These companies are the new IBM.
Now GPT is making humans dependent on the computer again, so that the computer and systems that are power in the hands of a few and the masses will become peripherals.
Ian, following the introduction of the internet we were discouraged at uni from referencing a website. We had to actually read books.
Golly gosh. Who would have thought that knowledge could be gained from reading books?
Michael, back in the 80s kids were discouraged from using hand held calculators so that they learned the skills to manipulate numbers. In Japan at that time it was reported that Japanese schools prohibited calculators for the same reason. Japan was the principal manufacturer of hand held calculators then.
In 2004 writing another thesis in the traditional poor solo student approach, one student colleague employed a local leading English teacher to edit and re-write a chapter of his thesis. The Professor of Law, who was also a Fellow of the same college, stated that this was OK. The student was awarded First Class Honours.
@ Michael Taylor – Counting on their fingers: Oh, I don’t know ….. Chisen-Bop counting is a body based mathematical calculating method based on the abacus that uses fingers, hands & and feet to do basic mathematical calculations very quickly.
Your commentaries are great! Informative and entertaining!
The amount of spam ads unfortunately detracts from the meaning and relevance of the articles:(
Bill
william cluney, I have zero spam or ads. The AIMN website is (I think?) built on a WordPress framework, and it’s relatively user-friendly in the sense that it doesn’t complain and get all antsy if one has an AdBlocker installed – for context, all my web activity is via a Mozilla Firefox browser on a PC, never a smart phone and only rarely a tablet. I have an adblocker add-on installed in my browser, as well as another add-on called NoScript which prevents automatic opening of third-party pages.
The results of this setup mean I have a very clean and minimalist environment, with zero extraneous data – spam or other crap. Just the head post and the replies, along with the standard AIMN header material and the Recent Comments list in an RHS sidebar.
Perhaps you could try that?
According to the writings of Plato, Socrates thought books would be a disadvantage to education.
When I started teaching writing meant cursive. Although there were a few kids who printed rather than wrote. These were branded as ‘disadvantaged'(the euphemism for ‘dumb’).
Many education systems no longer teach ‘running writing’.
60 years ago I would read some of my darlings set texts and she would write an A class essay from my C class thoughts.
Now a casual observation suggests the Socratic thought may be real this time???