Banning ChatGPT In Schools Is Like Banning Calculators In Math Class

Lately, I’ve been overwhelmed with inquiries about the impact Generative Artificial Intelligence will have on our world from every corner of the planet—teachers, media, government officials, and more. As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, I believe we should be investing heavily in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) but should do so with strategy and caution. This article marks the beginning of a series of articles in which I hope to illuminate industry-specific issues and help guide the public through this period of uncertainty.

ChatGPT and other Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools have caused swaths of school districts and government officials to ban the technology in classrooms—or at least attempt to. Engulfed by fear that these services will eliminate critical thinking and destroy our ability to standardize assessment of intelligence, these leaders have left out one critical point of assessment: these tools aren’t going away and by banning the tools they are failing to prepare their students for the world they will graduate into. Instead of turning away in fear, the tools should be embraced and education systems around the world should figure out how to adapt.

Why Not Ban Generative Artificial Intelligence?

The same way my parents had to learn library science to find a book and I had to learn Google search queries to enable me to better use the internet, students today need to learn how to work with these tools to participate in the modern world. Reducing a student’s potential to be successful in the future is the opposite of what an educator is supposed to do. At best these bans are wasted time and money and I’ll give you several reasons why:

• VPNs Eliminate Network-Level Control: Kids are smart. They’ll find ways around things if possible and if anything that should be a sign of their intelligence rather than rebellion. Recently I visited a local high school in Omaha, Nebraska to talk to kids about technology, and when I asked how many of them were familiar with VPNs the large majority raised their hands. Why? To get around the school’s network-level restrictions. System admins can’t stop this and if anything school districts are wasting precious budget on an endless game of whack-a-mole.
• Alternative Services Exist: You banned ChatGPT? Great, good job. There are already hundreds of articles pointing to ChatGPT alternatives and offshoots. Just like kids have secret calculator apps to hide photos and sensitive messages from their parents and teachers, they’re going to find ways to do the same with ChatGPT and GAI tools. A quick Google search will lead you to dozens of non-exhaustive lists. Give it three to six months and the volume of alternatives will be exponentially greater.
• Kids Need The Skills: We used to write paper and pencil before text editors. We used to do math with an abacus. We don’t these things anymore because we have better tools. Preventing kids from using GAI tools is like eliminating their ability to use a calculator in math class or Grammarly for editing their writing. The curriculum should be about preparing kids for the real world, not ensuring they can answer a multi-choice test or write a grammar-free essay by hand, that’s not what they’re going to be doing when they graduate.

All this being said, there are certainly concerns to be had and we need to work together to both understand the impact and identify meaningful paths forward to balance the risks with the reward. The remainder of this article will be dedicated to highlighting the impact these tools will have on our education systems, the risk they pose to students, and the ways educators can leverage these tools to make for a better educational experience.

What effect will GAI have on education?

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has the potential to impact education in profound ways. Used responsibly, these tools can be used for much more than simply drafting essays and correcting papers. What exactly could we see in the future?

1. Access to information: GAI tools can provide access to vast amounts of information and knowledge in dramatically shorter timelines. Students and teachers can use these tools to get quick and accurate answers to questions, learn new concepts, and access educational resources.
2. Personalized Learning: GAI software can be programmed to personalize educational content based on the individual needs and preferences of each student. This can help students learn more effectively and efficiently, as they receive content that is tailored to their learning style and pace.
3. Language Learning: GAI can assist in language learning by providing language practice and feedback. We’ve already seen tools like Duolingo make it easier to practice your language skills by creating chat systems to get more applied learning rather than textbook question/answer format.
4. Giving Teachers Time Back: Teachers are often some of the most underpaid and overworked people. GAI tools can help automate certain aspects of their work, such as curriculum development, saving teachers time and allowing them to focus on other aspects of teaching. If we can give teachers more of their life back and help them provide more human touch through individual student support—the things we need teachers for anyway—that seems like a win-win.
5. Assistive Technology: The greatest power of these tools is their ability to be interacted with through speech and text. Conversational interfaces can be used as an assistive technology tool for students with disabilities or special educational needs. For example, it can provide audio or visual cues to support learning, or it can generate text-to-speech output for students who have difficulty reading. For those with mobility issues, it reduces barriers. For younger or older students less familiar with computers it makes it as easy as talking to the machine.

What Are The Potential Downsides?

While you can be sure that we aren’t going to stop the use of GAI, we also need to be mindful of the potential downsides so we can prevent these issues as much as possible. As with any new technology, there are certainly risks the tools will pose to students, teachers, school administrators, and others involved in education. Here are a few possible threats:

• Dependence on technology: If students become too reliant on ChatGPT for answers and information, they may not develop critical thinking skills or the ability to research on their own. This could lead to a lack of creativity and independent thinking. However, this can be managed by building a curriculum that isn’t so reliant on the technology, or technology at large, to deliver an outcome.
• Inaccurate or biased information: ChatGPT and GAI tools are only as good as the data they’re trained on, so there is a risk that these tools may provide inaccurate or biased information. This could be especially problematic in subjects such as history or social studies, where perspectives and interpretations can vary widely. However, this also means there’s still plenty of room for humans in the loop. You can be sure there will be students who proudly hand in documents that are entirely false or blatantly wrong, and a bad grade will simply reinforce the fact that ChatGPT doesn’t know it all. We still need humans to decipher truth from fiction when it comes to the fancy Magic 8 Ball that is GAI in 2023.
• Cybersecurity & Privacy Concerns: Generative Artificial Intelligence, like any other online technology, is vulnerable to cyber-attacks and hacking. This could lead to personal information being compromised or sensitive data being stolen. And the more of us onboarding, the higher likelihood this happens. This leads to another argument which is that there are also obvious concerns about the privacy of students and teachers. The AI model may collect and store user data and do so at a much larger scale than the average application. As opaque as the industry is, we can be certain that this will only make privacy more difficult to protect.

Additional Risk To Children’s Health & Safety

Multiple States’ governing bodies have asked me about the potential implications this could mean for the health and wellness of the children in their schools. The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) does present risks related to issues such as bullying, sexual harassment, and swatting, among other issues.

• Increased Cyberbullying: GAI will be used to create convincing and realistic fake social media profiles that can be used to bully and harass students and teachers online. It is already being used to create hyper-realistic revenge porn through a proliferation of DeepNude services. It could be used to gather personal information about targets and to make inappropriate advances or solicitations. This can be done through dynamic prompting and lead to auto-populated content that can’t be tracked down or fully eliminated. At the same time, the proliferation of multiple fake profiles created by bad actors leveraging GAI to accelerate their criminal behavior could make it difficult to track down the perpetrators and hold them accountable.
• Increased Fake Emergency Threats: GAI could be used to create fake emergencies, such as bomb threats or active shooter situations, which could lead to more swatting incidents. It could autogenerate content to call the cops or engage in swatting operations. It could create a fake emergency down the road or at another school to distract law enforcement from the true location of the crime. The exponential growth of these incidents could result in significant disruption to education and put the lives of students and teachers at risk.
• Encouraging Cultural Taboos: Often the bot is a great support system when spoken to as a partner or friend. Unfortunately, sometimes support is not the right answer and these bots are incapable of deciphering that. There are already stories of conversations that have led to individuals being pushed toward suicide or enabling child predators. This is not going to be easy to police nor will it disappear anytime soon. Parents and teachers alike will need to be even more on alert to ensure these systems don’t promote the worst of our society.

These are only a few simple examples of the potential threats these tools could cause our education system and it is important to recognize that the appropriate safeguards and policies must be put in place to mitigate these risks. This could include stricter regulation of GAI technology from government officials, education and awareness campaigns around the responsible use of technology in schools, and the development of technologies and approaches to detect and prevent the misuse of GAI.

How Can Educators Differentiate Themselves?

Ellen B. Meier, Professor of Computing and Educational Practice at Columbia University, was quoted in an article stating “Tools such as ChatGPT can present teachers with new pedagogical opportunities to move away from transmission teaching and begin to design more active, culturally relevant learning environments. They challenge us to think creatively about the very process of education.”

• Experiential Education Opportunities: Research shows that lecture-based education systems and programming based on ROTE memory do not benefit students as much as experiential learning. Furthermore, hands-on activities and tangible, project-based education is something that can not easily be fully replicated through GAI. Perhaps instructions on how to build the project or tutorials on how to present it may be provided by GAI but why is that so different than what they can already find through YouTube?
• Create Internet-Less Classrooms: Complete elimination of Internet in the classroom would be a tremendous failure of any educational system but perhaps we have classrooms or specific classes where Wi-Fi is throttled entirely and students are forced to do their work without these tools. Create an environment where they’re forced to write by hand or build with teams and practice the fundamentals we’re hoping GAI doesn’t eliminate.
• Cutting Edge Curriculum: For now, and for the foreseeable future, these tools will be created mostly from old information. To release them to the wild and let them learn from the internet is guaranteed to ensure the downfall of the tools as we’ve seen with previous examples like Microsoft MSFT Tay. That means there’s room for activities that are built around more current events, things that the bots may not be aware of yet.
• Teaching Trade Skills: While people may not want to hear it, some of the safest jobs now and into the future will be trade labor. These are skills that AI will find difficult to replicate and replace. These are jobs that are often well paying and stable—careers worth teaching.
• Teach Divergent Thinking Skills: The same tool that can be used to generate the rough draft of a homework assignment can be used to teach kids about different ways of thinking. Similarly, when the bot gives the student a fake or incorrect answer it forces the student to learn critical thinking skills. Teachers should create homework that requires students to prompt the tool to give them explanations from alternative points of view and to require students to integrate the inverse of their thoughts into their thinking. Teachers could also require students to create multiple drafts with one master draft explaining their thoughts about the differences and the value created by each.
• Collaborative Learning: This is a new era. Everyone is learning together. Teachers should require students to deliver their prompts as part of their homework and provide the classroom with discussion opportunities to learn how to work with these machines.
• More One-on-One Time: One of the biggest things teachers can do to ensure “cheating” with GAI isn’t happening is to get to know their students better. Understand how they think, how they write, and how they see the world. Not only will this provide more personalized learning opportunities but will also enable teachers to recognize when submissions might have been generated by AI. Perhaps the combination of drafting program curriculum and assisting in assessment will give teachers more time to focus on the human aspects of their jobs, like getting to know their students and catering to their needs.

A New Era of Education

We’ve entered the age of AI and educators would be foolish to prevent their students from learning how to work and live with these tools. While it can be daunting to adapt and learn new ways of life we can be sure this is how math teachers felt when the calculator first came out, English teachers felt when tools like spellcheck came along, and librarians felt when Wikipedia took over.

While ChatGPT and GAI tools have the potential to revolutionize education it is also important to be aware of these potential threats and take steps to mitigate them. This could include implementing stronger cybersecurity measures, discovering ways to use GAI as a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional teaching methods, and ensuring that student and teacher privacy is protected.

While intimidating in the near term, we should not hide from the future, we should embrace it and learn how it can make life better. Done well we will see a future of education that is more personalized, accessible, and efficient. Learning experiences for students should become more interactive and constructive rather than binary and ROTE. This is progress and to push it away is to fail your classroom.