Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 291 | Shaping Section | 3

Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 291 | April 7-13, 2023

ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

By Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review | April 6, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

Just days after OpenAI dropped ChatGPT in late November 2022, the chatbot was widely denounced as a free essay-writing, test-taking tool that made it laughably easy to cheat on assignments.  Educational institutes across the world reacted by from banning the softwareto issuing statements that warned students against using ChatGPT to cheat.

This initial panic from the education sector was understandable. ChatGPT, available to the public via a web app, can answer questions and generate slick, well-structured blocks of text several thousand words long on almost any topic it is asked about, from string theory to Shakespeare. Each essay it produces is unique, even when it is given the same prompt again, and its authorship is (practically) impossible to spot. It looked as if ChatGPT would undermine the way we test what students have learned, a cornerstone of education.

But three months on, the outlook is a lot less bleak. Far from being just a dream machine for cheaters, many teachers now believe, ChatGPT could actually help make education better.  Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more.  Educational-tech companies including Duolingo and Quizlet, which makes digital flash cards and practice assessments used by half of all high school students in the US, have already integrated OpenAI’s chatbot into their apps. And OpenAI has worked with educators to put together a fact sheet about ChatGPT’s potential impact in schools. The company says it also consulted educators when it developed a free tool to spot text written by a chatbot (though its accuracy is limited). 

It is far too soon to say what the lasting impact of ChatGPT will be—it hasn’t even been around for a full semester. What’s certain is that essay-writing chatbots are here to stay. And they will only get better at standing in for a student on deadline—more accurate and harder to detect. Banning them is futile, possibly even counterproductive.

For now, teachers have been thrown into a radical new experiment. They need support to figure it out—perhaps even government support in the form of money, training, and regulation. But this is not the end of education. It’s a new beginning.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Just days after OpenAI dropped ChatGPT in late November 2022, the chatbot was widely denounced as a free essay-writing, test-taking tool that made it laughably easy to cheat on assignments.  Educational institutes across the world reacted by from banning the softwareto issuing statements that warned students against using ChatGPT to cheat.
2. But three months on, the outlook is a lot less bleak. Far from being just a dream machine for cheaters, many teachers now believe, ChatGPT could actually help make education better.  Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more.  
3. It is far too soon to say what the lasting impact of ChatGPT will be—it hasn’t even been around for a full semester. What’s certain is that essay-writing chatbots are here to stay.

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Topics:  Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Chat GPT, Education