AI in education: Pros and cons of ChatGPT in the classroom | Michael McGuire

We have to accept these new technologies when we are teaching children to cope in the beyond-school world — but carefully, writes Michael McGuire.

Is this the end of the honest quiz night?

No doubt, the humble quiz night has been under pressure for a little while, what with everyone trying to find surreptitious ways to use their mobile.

Even though it’s easy enough to spot a cheat. They are the ones who have scored the perfect 10 in the music round.

Sadly, the quiz night is now under threat on two fronts. Future ignorance and the ever-forward march of technology.

As the kiddies file back to school this week, some of them will be enjoying the last year of a geography curriculum that will be soon be changed. The new curriculum has already been criticised for giving students a “significantly reduced’’ view of the world. Apparently, students won’t be given much information on what lies beyond Australia’s borders.

This is a blow for quiz nights. Each table needs that person who knows the capital of Ecuador, which country Timbuktu is in, or how many US states begin with the letter “N”.

That’s the ignorance end of the argument.

The ever-evolving technology argument has ramped up again with the chat about the artificial intelligence writing machine ChatGPT.

Why write an essay yourself when a robot – or ChatGPT – can do it for you? Picture: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP

To use ChatGPT, you type in a bunch of instructions and questions, and moments later, out sprouts a human-like, well-written, easily digestible answer.

It poses serious questions, even beyond cheating at quiz nights.

What impact will artificial intelligence have on the hows and whys of teaching primary, secondary and tertiary students?

ChatGPT is so convincing that it has a passed a final exam for a Master of Business Administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and some scientists are using it to help write research papers.

The rate of change is hard to process and makes it almost impossible to predict what technology will be one day be regarded as commonplace by those children who are taking their first steps in the schoolyard this week.

All we know is the world will again be radically different.

By then ChatGPT will seem quaint. A blackboard in a hi-tech world.

The emergence of the latest strain of ChatGPT has caused many ructions around the educational world. It’s use has been banned in NSW and Queensland schools, but South Australian students will be able to use the technology.

Education Department chief Martin Westwell made the reasonable point that “artificial intelligence is now part of our world and it will be the world our young people are going to be part of’’.

The state’s three universities are also grappling with ChatGPT and have updated their integrity policies to try to cope with the idea that students will be able to submit essays they haven’t written themselves.

As we have seen many times before, blanket bans never work.

So we have to accept that it’s necessary to incorporate these new technologies when we are teaching children to cope in the beyond-school world.

Yet, we have to be careful. We have to be careful not to use technology as a substitute for knowledge.

Kids still need to be taught the basics. They need to be taught how to add up, how to construct sentences, how to think for themselves and not just to rely on a machine to do it all for them.

They still need to be encouraged to be creative. Just because a machine can now write a novel, it doesn’t mean it should.

And we have to keep encouraging kids to be individuals. If 50 students put in the same parameters into ChatGPT, you are going to get back 50 identical essays.

That’s a very beige world. A world where new ideas won’t be encouraged.

And, while the educational bodies talk about being able to block websites and track plagiarism, there is always a suspicion that the technology will be at least a step ahead of large, sometimes unwieldy, institutions.

Educating children today is a much different proposition than it was a decade or two back.

Schools have adapted enormously and for the most part have done it well. There is the odd push back, usually from politicians, who still think we are living in the 1950s.

People like former education minister Alan Tudge who got all worked up at the thought of some nuance and debate around the meaning of Anzac Day a couple of years ago.

Tudge just thought it was “sacred’’ and there the story ended.

Of course, that is not education. That is indoctrination.

Kids today are more aware, more curious, and more connected than previous generations. They have access to all sorts of different views of the world.

But they are also more exposed and vulnerable.

What the education system hopefully does is give them the tools to interpret that world and give them the reasoning and intellectual skills to make sense of it all. To survive and thrive in it.

Whether any of that will help them win a quiz night is a very different matter.