Impromptu summary

Mention the idea of AI entering the world of education and academia, and people respond with outrage: “Students will be able to find all the answers!” “It’ll be easier to cheat!” However, when beloved seventy-year-old professor Stephen Mintz was introduced to ChatGPT – a publicly available chat application that is based on GPT-4 – he had a different reaction. He couldn’t wait to start incorporating it into his lessons.

New technology has often changed the face of education: Calculators allowed for more complex math problems. Google made us less reliant on memorizing facts. School libraries have been largely replaced or augmented by online databases.

If AI can do the same work as a human, Mintz argues, then it’s pointless for humans to be competing with that. Humans should be focusing on their unique abilities, such as finding the best questions to ask AIs, learning skills that aren’t in the AI’s training data, and turning the advanced observations of AI into real actions.

These require skills like exploration, curiosity, and leadership – things that humans excel at, but AI, not so much.

So how can these Large Language Models practically assist teachers like Stephen Mintz in the classroom? When asked this question, GPT-4 generated a few suggestions.

Firstly, the AI could create personalized tests or lesson plans for pupils, taking into account their learning goals, strengths and weaknesses, and overall progress, then give thorough and immediate feedback as needed.

It could also facilitate group collaboration, by creating games or scenarios to make students work together to solve problems, all while providing support and structure.

Finally, AI could act as a facilitator for debates and discussions, providing facts, prompts, and counterarguments as needed, at a much faster and more accurate rate than any human could. This could give teachers the freedom to sit back and observe and assess students’ performance.

However, the successful future of AI in education isn’t guaranteed. When prompted, GPT-4 offers optimistic and pessimistic predictions. Optimistically, in the next fifty years AI becomes readily available, and gives teachers more opportunities to engage and inspire their students.

However, GPT-4’s pessimistic prediction sees this technology limited by cost and privacy concerns, meaning that the advantages are only given to a privileged few, creating further inequity in the education system.

These scenarios may have been generated by AI, but it is up to humans to decide which one comes to light.