I’ve seen a lot of articles recently talk about how AI, specifically Chat GPT, is revolutionizing the future of education. They say things like, ‘AI is changing the way universities teach.’ When really, I think what’s changing is how teachers and universities treat cheating. Because that’s all that’s really changing-cheating. Now kids can cheat very well. That’s the problem. But like any social issue, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

That ‘AI is changing the way universities teach’ is the 20-something journalist way of putting that information out there in an easy-to-digest bottle, when really it’s a hugely complicated issue. Artificial Intellegence now allows kids, who before couldn’t string two thoughts into a coherent sentence together, into full agents of their own mind who, at will, can now create pages of critical thought and even coding with a simple query. This is what changed. I’ll show you.

Gold Star For You, AI

Now let’s say you’re in an AP English class your Junior year in High School. Let’s say you’re not really much of a reader and mostly spend your days learning how to code video games or playing COD. When you get a prompt in your class asking you to “explicate the themes of the novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ from the lens of the New Feminist theory,” you’re probably gonna lose it. You just finished an 6-hour COD session, you’re pounding Sprite, and you’ve just learned that the book isn’t about baseball. You can call your sister’s friend’s cousin, spend all night cramming ideas onto a blank page and praying it comes out right, or you can just go to Chat GPT, log in, and ask your prompt. Like so:

Pretty neat right? You’re probably thinking, it can’t really help with full assignments because that’s only an introduction, papers are 2-3 pages long sometimes. Well, that’s where ‘keep going’ comes in.

For High School, this is probably somewhere between a C and B, as is. For college, maybe a C. Of course, you’ll want to add a few things here and there maybe a quote, but that’s nothing ChatGPT can’t help you out with.

AI, can you do sumn for me?

The point being made here is that now students across the entire spectrum of education from anywhere in the world have access to their own personalized assistant; a tutor, in some ways. It’s a pretty revolutionary thing once you think about the students who have questions that aren’t getting answered. I was one of those kids. I’d always raise my hand and ask questions that may have seemed errant or pointless but they all helped me learn things in my own way, so when I wouldn’t get an answer it forced me to figure things out in other ways. That’s a good and bad thing.

Students who are forced to figure things out on their own develop skills that help them get answers, might not always be the right answer but they become resourceful. They learn to ask friends, learn how to search things properly on the internet, or even a library. It’s a trade that is slowly going away with the internet, moreso with ChatGPT.

But now we have students that have answers right at their finger tips. Even if they can’t find the answers they know how to look for them and what it takes to get the right answer. Even with coding, you can input a code that won’t work and if you tell it it doesn’t, it’ll let you know possible reasons why it doesn’t work. It gets into the specifics without any of the garbage regular people try to put in. You’ve been there, asked someone a simple question and then you spend 20 minutes realizing you made a mistake.

AI Teachers Have No B.O.

The “change” that is going to happen is how teachers respond to these submissions. Is it fair for a student to have half of their paper written by an AI? Does it change how they learn? The biggest hurdle is deciphering which students cheat and don’t because the language used in this AI is pretty sophisticated. Changing a few ten cent words here and there and you’ll probably get away with it. It’s gonna take teachers who are good readers, which really means do you know your students. I can 100% tell when a student has plagiarized or cheated because it doesn’t sound like them. It’ll be a test of will, will teachers conform and adjust or will students acquiesce and give up?

I was teaching a creative writing class and had a student that was like 11 or 12 and he was a persistent writer. The kid had ideas that would come out of thin air like magic and he’d create worlds and characters with no holds barred. I’m curious how he will respond to this new world. Will he let his mind wander and use his imagination as he’s doing now or will he start to use the technologies we have to put out as much work as he can think of. The possibilities are endless and shouldn’t be a point of concern.

Please think for yourself. It’s easy to think change can be bad but I’m here to say, as a 20-something in the US, that it’s a lot brighter than we think. That’s a bit oxymoronic but you get what I mean. The future of education is always changing, don’t let editorials gaslight progress. It ain’t all Big Brother and Singularity in the future, maybe we get virtual post-it notes, that’s what I want.