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The recent launch and popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT has led to a myriad of diverse reactions
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across all industries, most specifically education. Some are excited about the potential of how this generative AI technology can help students
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learn better. Whereas others are concerned about students using ChatGPT to simply cheat on their assignments
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That's what brings me to this post in the ChatGPT sub on Reddit, because both of these
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viewpoints kind of collided together leading to an interesting discussion. It started with this thread
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A parent shared that their daughter wanted to use ChatGPT on a managed Chromebook device
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only to discover that it was blocked by her school district. They saw this as a disservice to the writing task she was trying to accomplish
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They wrote, Seems like an utter failure on behalf of the education system to me
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As often with all divisive topics on Reddit, this statement spawned a series of different
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viewpoints both for and against the ban. Some self-identified educators backed the school's policy of blocking ChatGPT
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This user wrote, I've spent three minutes on this sub and worked out how to make ChatGPT break the rules
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So would a teenager. If you as a parent want your child to access ChatGPT, they can do it on your network and
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your device. Schools do not need that kind of liability. Another Reddit user had this to say
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AI-assisted authoring is not suitable for former academic works, for the same reason
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citing Wikipedia isn't allowed. The purpose of academic authorship and citation is to establish a chain of authenticity and originality
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There were also users who supported the restriction, but only temporarily until schools learned
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more about technology. This Redditor said, Blocking isn't going to stop everyone, but it might buy districts a little more time
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to get their game plan in order. Another said, Maybe give the school district more than a week to work out how to handle this tool
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So these statements to me seemed reasonable, but while there appeared to be some support
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for blocking ChatGPT, others saw the restriction as somewhat of a futile move
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One user said, Teachers work so hard to make sure kids aren't cheating or off-task
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It gets funny at some point. There's always a workaround. Another said
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It should be available since it can easily be used for gathering information, not just
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for plagiarism. I also think that calling it plagiarism is misleading since no person's original work
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is being sold as one's own. Finally, you had others who were a bit more optimistic about the role of AI in education
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I'm an educator, so I am testing ChatGPT to find the best ways to integrate it into my
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classroom activities. And this user had this to say about schools, They're currently having the same reaction they had with the internet, Google, advanced
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calculators, Wikipedia, spell checkers, grammar checkers, word processors, etc. Eventually they'll realize it isn't going anywhere, take a breath, and incorporate it
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into the curriculum like every other technology in the last three decades
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So I'm sharing these reactions with you because it seems that educators are wrestling with
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the potential positive and negative impacts of ChatGPT. Personally, I'm not sure that blocking it entirely solves the concept of plagiarism
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only because there's dozens if not hundreds of other generative writing platforms like
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Jasper AI or CopyAI. Sure, blocking made it impossible to generate writing assignments on ChatGPT in school
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but what's stopping a student from signing up for a free account and doing the same thing on one of these other writing services
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I suppose you could try to find and block all of the generative AI sites, but then it
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kind of becomes a game of digital whack-a-mole. And even if there were some way to completely wipe out that entire category of generative
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AI, there's popular toolers like Canva who have already incorporated the technology into
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their platform. The new feature, MagicWrite, was actually designed from OpenAI's GPT-3 model, and while
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it's not available on Canva's education accounts, this is just one of the many examples of a
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popular service integrating ChatGPT technology. With everything said, I don't think you can deny that this technology is going to have
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a major impact on education, and we're not entirely sure if it's negative or positive
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But the question we're all wondering is, what do we do now
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And that's what I'm going to ask you. If you're in education, how should we react to the popularity of ChatGPT
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Should schools block it entirely, temporarily, or not at all? Go ahead and leave a response in the comment section below
