What might ChatGPT mean for higher education and society?
EDITED TO ADD: This is a living document, and has grown since first posted.
Today I’m hosting a Future Trends Forum session on the topic (please do join us!). Here I’d like to offer some resources in support of it, for participants and anyone else interested.
To begin with, here’s the OpenAI page introducing the bot and a button to press to start it up.
Next, resources, including readings, podcasts, videos, and projects. Each has a few words about why I found them to be useful.
Readings
Ian Bogost, “ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think: Treat it like a toy, not a tool” critiques the technology, seeing it as an epic purveyor of bullshit, then asks us to consider the bot as a kind of toy or instrument to play with the broad sweep of digital content.
Katy Ilonka Gero, “AI Reveals the Most Human Parts of Writing” argues for AI as a writing assistant, especially helping with the less imaginative parts of composition and creativity.
Nancy Gleason, “ChatGPT and the rise of AI writers: how should higher education respond?” recommends alternative assessments as well as having students use chatbots to produce writing they can critique.
David Golumbia, “ChatGPT Should Not Exist” charges generative AI with nihilism and a bad view of humanity.
Daniel Herman, “The End of High-School English: I’ve been teaching English for 12 years, and I’m astounded by what ChatGPT can produce” thinks the tech will enable students to cheat at major levels. “What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor.”
Darren Hudson Hick, “Today, I turned in the first plagiarist I’ve caught using A.I. software to write her work…” (Facebook post) describes a case of cheating with ChatGPT and draws conclusions from the experience.
Anders Isaksson, “ChatGPT and its Effects on Higher Education” offers an overview of the technology and various implications for education, including for copyright.
Sung Kim, “How to Detect OpenAI’s ChatGPT Output” shows how to use one tool (Hugging Face’s RoBERTa Base OpenAI Detector) to detect bot writing.
Steven D. Krause, “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay'” finds several major problems with ChatGPT. First, writing instructors should be able to spot bot writing and respond appropriately. Second, the bot can’t do research. Instead, the tool might help some students improve their writing, and instructors should craft better assignments.
Stephen Marche, “The College Essay Is Dead: Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia” thinks, as per the title, that ChatGPT has killed the college essay, at least in the humanities. Now we wants more discussions between humanists and technologists.
Beth McMurtrie, “Teaching Experts Are Worried About ChatGPT, but Not for the Reasons You Think” interviews a group of writing instructors on their views, covering a lot of ground.
Katie Metzler and ChatGPT, “How ChatGPT Could Transform Higher Education” covers a lot of implications, and is also a good example of using the tech to write a significant part of the post.
Anna Mills, “How do we prevent learning loss due to AI text generators?” A list of teaching ideas. A living document.
Ethan Mollick, “The Mechanical Professor” uses the bot to develop class syllabi, then several types of academic writing.
Eva Rtology, “How to Identify chatGPT stories?” advises us that readers can detect bot writing, and that tools under development (and some already available) will help us do that.
Jeff Schatten, “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing? Online programs can churn out decent papers on the cheap. What now?” makes the case for chatbots’ limitations and in favor of changing pedagogies to ward off plagiarism.
Brad Stone, “Anti-Cheating Education Software Braces for AI Chatbots” considers how Turnitin and others might respond.
John Warner, “Freaking Out About ChatGPT—Part I” – thinks the bot condemns bad essay teaching, especially in K-12. Hopefully we’ll move past that pedagogy to a better one which “let[s] students explore the messy and fraught process of learning how to write.”
Marc Watkins, “AI Will Augment, Not Replace” reports on the University of Mississippi’s recent work on chatbots and education, including the use of a counterargument generator.
Bibliographies
Anna Mills, “AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing: Starting Points for Inquiry” collects a set of introductions and resources.
____, “AI Text Generators: Sources to Stimulate Discussion among Teachers,” Google Doc with many, many sources.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, “ChatGPT” Zotero collection.
Vanessa Vaile’s Diigo collection.
Podcasts
Intelligence Squared, “ChatGPT: The Death and Rebirth of Writing” – a discussion with Steven Marche.
Intentional Teaching, “AI Writing with Robert Cummings” explores the University of Mississippi’s exploration of automated writing.
Mike Palmer, “ChatGPT and the Future of Education with Nancy our Virtual Cohost” addresses a range of ways the bot can change or be used within higher education. Nice use of ChatGPT to create content for an AI speaker, too.
Videos
BioLab Collective, “Can AI replace Professors? | AI and the Future of Education” works through various potential uses of the bot in classes, evaluating each.
Sora Schools, “ChatGPT Explained: Sora CEO on the Future of Education & AI” calls ChatGPT an educational disruptor and calls on schools to include the tech in curricula.
Projects
Wordcraft Writers Workshop is, from their description:
a collaboration between Google’s PAIR and Magenta teams, and 13 professional writers from a diverse set of creative writing backgrounds. Together we explore the limits of co-writing with LaMDA and foster an honest and earnest conversation about the rapidly changing relationship between technology and creativity.
If there’s interest, I can keep this going. And please do share anything we should add in comments.
(thanks to Mark Johnstone for additional resources)
I ran a prompt of mine through the software, after setting up an account.
It was fun, actually. The prose seems fluid and generally referenced key ideas from Frank Herbert’s Dune. I’d like to see more prose that nice from undergrads.
It failed, and failed miserably, at citing and integrating quotations from a SPECIFIC edition of Dune that I used last term. Miserably failed.
Next term I’ll run my prompts through to see what I get, then compare what students submit. If it’s too close, Honor Trial here we come. I’ve gotten four kids convicted of plagiarism in the past decade: and the work was groaningly bad, in any case.
Should we clutch our pearls and flap our hands? Naw. Bogost is correct. The fear that Open AI’s Chat GTP evoked says more about us than the technology. Essays are not dead nor are the Humanities. Wolfram Alpha and calculators have not killed Mathematics.
Poor teaching and poorly written assignments?
Dead. Bring on the robots.
The inability to research – to cite external sources correctly – is a red line.
For now.
Thanks for the very comprehensive reading list.
Glad to, Basiyr. More on today’s post!
Interesting compilation, Thanks!
AI and NLP has huge potential to transform training and education industry and feels like we are just getting started. Here is an elaborate blog and link to beta version of an AI powered tool we are developing to aid Instructional Designers get more efficient. Would appreciate to get this added.
https://id-assist.co/blog/f/chatgpt-for-instructional-design-and-elearning-development
https://id-assist.co/
Pingback: AI & the Future of Assessment in Higher Education - Durham Centre for Academic Development
Pingback: AI in Teaching and Learning | Office of Digital Learning - Nevada Today
Pingback: Here Comes chatGPT…Paradigm Shift or Higher Ed Hype Cycle? – The Learning & Applied Innovation Digital Garden
Pingback: Practical Responses to ChatGPT and Curated Resources – Albright's Digital Learning & Innovation Blog
Pingback: Frequently Asked Questions: ChatGPT and generative AI in teaching … – The Iron Warrior – 데이터랩 일점일
Pingback: Adapting to AI in the Classroom for Time-Strapped Instructors | The Innovative Instructor
Pingback: Should you add an AI policy to your syllabus? - Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
Pingback: What might ChatGPT mean for higher education? - BlogABC.org