Man Versus Machine: AI and ChatGPT
We get the Wall Street Journal delivered to our house everyday, and I love having a real newspaper to hold and flip through each day. It keeps me current on news, finance topics, lifestyle, culture, and what’s trending. I will always prefer a newsPAPER to a screen!
This weekend, an interesting and very relevant story was published on AI: ChatGPT. Specifically, the dilemma this new Artificial Intelligence is posing to humanity as a whole. I first heard about ChatGPT when one of my school’s instructional coaches sent an email detailing an upcoming teacher training on how to harness the power of ChatGPT in the classroom. I next heard about it from teachers as they began getting homework and essay submissions from students that had clearly used ChatGPT to cheat. I’m not even sure if today’s students consider this cheating; they have grown up their entire lives finding answers online in a matter of seconds and sending photos of their homework to friends to copy.
Today’s students are avoiding work just like previous generations did, but it is so much easier for them to do so. This is part of the reason why I make about half of my homework optional now (“Check Your Understanding” problems, as explained in Building Thinking Classrooms). I am not giving credit for copied work. Students need to prove their understanding in class during activities and on various forms of assessments.
Here is the article:
There are many parts of this article that were concerning to me and reading it gave me a slight existential crisis: What will be the purpose of humans once AI can do everything? It also further solidified my belief that coding is the future, and if you can’t code and control the computers/robots/AI, you will be at the mercy of those who can.
The article prompted me to finally try out ChatGPT for myself for the first time. Most of my students have tried it out before, and since it was free to test out the software, I created a log-in account and asked it to create a test on exponential functions for me. The questions were predictable and standard for most math textbooks:
I think the real point of emphasis is that as a math teacher, I need to remember that my students today will have AI in their very near future to do everything involving basic computations. How can I help them thrive in a future where creativity, problem solving, and human soft skills are in demand? I’m going to continue to strive for more collaboration, more student-led discovery, more open-ended questions, and more application problems involving interpretation and drawing conclusions.