ChatGPT, A Transformational Tool?

ChatGPT, the chatbot, has made a lot of waves. Initially, people had fun. Then they were impressed. Next came the fears that it would be used by kids for writing school/college essays, and that it would do jobs that involved generating content in certain formats (like secretaries).

 

Then people started testing its limits. And found it could clear the US exam medical students take to become licensed doctors. It could even explain how it arrived its answers! While it’s nowhere near replacing doctors, could it serve as a support tool for doctors? It managed to get B/B+ grade in an MBA exam designed by a Wharton professor. Remember, these were descriptive answer tests, not multiple-choice questions, which makes it very impressive.

 

ChatGPT in the classroom seems to raise the most concerns. Will students cheat and use it to do the assignments? To do the homework? A game of cat and mouse was on. Some instructors started insisting their students come up with the basic skeleton of their answers to assignments in the classroom. At home, they could only build on and expand on that skeleton, not add altogether new points.

 

But of course, like any tool or technology, ChatGPT can be used for better learning too. As Thomas Rid describes. His institute conducted a 5-day course on the security aspects of computer science. Students were allowed to use ChatGPT through the course. His takeaway?

“It will transform higher education. Here’s why.”

 

First, he says, it helps filter the “mundane questions”, as one student put it.

“Meaning: you can ask the dumb questions to the AI, instead of in-class. Yes, there are dumb questions—or at least there are questions where the answer is completely obvious to anybody who knows even just a little.”

 

Second, if a term or reference doesn’t make sense (or you forgot what it was), “you no longer disrupt the flow of the class”, something many students said. How is that different from Googling during class, I thought? Aha, Googling throws up links, you click, scroll, and read… it takes far too long. By then, the class has moved ahead. Whereas ChatGPT can give you the exact answer quickly.

 

Third, more students found they could keep up and comprehend with help from ChatGPT, so fewer students dropped out. After all, it could explain jargon, terms explained earlier that you’d forgotten, things the lecturer assumed people would know, stuff that most people in the class knew (but you didn’t). If the instructor asked the class to use a software tool or feature, for example, one could take ChatGPT’s help to use it (if one didn’t know the tool already).

 

All in all, ChatGPT (and its successors) looks like a game-changing AI in multiple ways. And like any tech, it will enable both great things and bad things.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire ...
Read more

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn...
Read more

Europe #3 - Innsbruck

The last city we visited in Europe was Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. After the cold and windy experience (at times) of Paris and Netherlands, Innsbruck was a wonderful change – it didn’t feel that cold, it was not windy all of which made it easy to walk around. Something absolutely necessary given how scenic the place is.   Since the hotel check-in time was much later in the day, we left the baggage and went to the Swarovski HQ-cum-museum about an hour by bus from Innsbruck. The crystal exhibits were brilliant – colorful, bright, shiny. Jewellery aside, it was a display of what one can do with crystals. While my wife and daughter loved the jewellery, I liked the superhero themed exhibits of Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Star Wars. We didn’t buy anything there, though we did buy stuff in the Swarovski store in Innsbruck – jewellery, not the superhero stuff.   Innsbruck is a major tourist attraction during the skiing season but now in summer, we saw many groups of ...
Read more