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An Analysis and Projection of AI in Education
Strengths
Accessible and User-Friendly
It is easy to make an account, and students and teachers can use ChatGPT with an existing account, like their Google account, to make logging in a seamless process. They can also access it directly from the internet, so all they need to use it is broadband connection. The interface is also easy to navigate, making it an accessible application for essentially all ages and all different technological abilities. Once you create an account or log on, the chat page pops up as the only page to view. The chat bar is easy to spot, and it prompts you with some example questions to ask. It also provides information on the bot's capabilities and limitations. ChatGPT also saves all chats and makes it easy to revisit them and continue the conversation. In essence, it "remembers" what you say.
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Name Recognition
Another noteworthy strength is that ChatGPT is a pioneer in the field of large language model chatbots. When people think of a chatbot to use online, many navigate to ChatGPT because of its status and the credibility and attention it has garnered over the past 6 months. It also is a product of OpenAI, who created the large language model that ChatGPT and other chatbots use to operate. This adds a level of ethos to the application and makes people in education more willing to use it.
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Continuous Improvement
OpenAI has leaders in the field of AI conducting research everyday, and their work results in consistent developments to the GPT model and rollouts of improved versions. According to a recent Bloomberg Intelligence report, ChatGPT is going to fuel the growing generative AI market, which is estimated to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032 (2023).
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Personalized Learning
ChatGPT can create a personalized learning experience by engaging in a conversational manner that creates a human-like dynamic. This makes it easy to ask a variety of questions and have the chatbot respond based on your prompts for information. No two responses from the chatbot are alike, so whatever you input into the chatbot will result in a personalized output based on your content and phrasing.
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Multi-Lingual
ChatGPT is available in different languages so that it can have a global reach. Additionally, it can help with translation between languages.
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These strengths can be leveraged as the language model continues to grow and adopt more users. The continuous advancements that OpenAI makes will help them to attract new users and maintain the interest of their current users. ChatGPT also has the ability to personalize learning in unparalleled ways by providing
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Weaknesses
Limited Knowledge and Contextual Understanding
Although ChatGPT has billions of parameters and virtually knows all of the information on the internet, it has a current knowledge cutoff of 2021 (and, as we know, a lot has happened since then!). It also does not have real knowledge; it does not actually "understand" the information it is processing or responses that it is producing. Therefore, it does not have a contextual understanding of the information that it provides, which can lead to insufficient responses or responses that do not consider more nuanced contexts.
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Biases and Assumptions
The internet is biased! It is incredibly so, because humans are biased and a lot of the content we create and put on the internet is informed by bias, is created to push a certain agenda, reflects Western, white ideologies, and comes from a certain perspective that is not objective. Although the chatbot tries to take this into account by qualifying its answers with an acknowledgement of biases or certain perspectives, it does not have actual awareness to understand what biases and stereotypes are (Maastricht University, n.d.). Its foundation is built on biases, so it cannot escape them.
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Lack of Emotional Intelligence
ChatGPT has an absence of emotional intelligence and empathy, because it is not sentient. It is an inadequate tool for understanding and responding to students' emotions, and it cannot understand nuance.
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Accessibility
Although ChatGPT is free and accessible to all with internet access, it is inaccessible to those who lack digital literacy or digital access. With a tool this powerful being accessible to some and not others, it can and will increase the digital divide and knowledge gap.
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OpenAI is transparent about the potential for bias in the model and is actively working toward mitigating them through research and development. Also, through research and development the model will be able to process more information and, more importantly, more accurate information. It might not be able to achieve true emotional intelligence, but OpenAI can continue work on sentiment analysis to have the model understand and respond to human affectation.
Opportunities
Enhanced Personalized Learning
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ChatGPT can create personalized learning experiences by tailoring content and suggestions to meet students' individual needs. There is no limit to the specificity of the prompts that students can ask the chatbot, so its operating baseline is already hyper-individualized based on what the student is asking, how they are asking it, and what kind of response they are anticipating. No two prompt responses are alike; they are all generated with direct influence from the diction of the prompt itself.
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Instant Feedback and Support
ChatGPT can provide immediate feedback, answers, and explanations to students, allowing for quick learning iterations and content production. It can generate text exponentially faster than a human can, which makes it an alluring tool for any kind of written content creation. It can also process already created text and provide specific feedback and edits (OpenAI, 2023). For example, students can use it to help them generate an outline for an essay, or they can receive feedback on an essay that they already wrote. Instructors have also been using it as a tool for learning how to write effective essays. They have students use ChatGPT to generate an essay and then have the students edit and rewrite the essay based on what they learned in class about writing effective essays.
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Safe Fail Space & Ideation Space
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ChatGPT provides an opportunity for students and teachers to ask any kind of question and get a response within seconds. If used with intention, students can experience an effective process of design thinking: ideation. They can ask questions and generate ideas and use the chatbot to help get out of creative ruts or writer's block. They can test ideas and get immediate feedback.
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OpenAI is in a position with many opportunities in education, and if they focus on growing these opportunities then they will continue to set themselves apart from other education technologies. It is important that OpenAI capitalizes on the need for more personalized instruction for students, and more day-to-day support for teachers.
Threats
Critical Thinking Concerns
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Students can develop a dependence on ChatGPT due to its accessibility, efficiency, and ease-of-use. This poses the risk of reducing students' critical thinking skills in education and self-reliance and confidence in their own ideas. They may assume that they should use a chatbot that has more knowledge than they do, because it will have better answers and create better content. They might also have less of a will to work hard or do their work ahead of time, as they know that the chatbot can produce content for them at the last minute if needed.
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Data Privacy and Security Concerns
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Students cannot use ChatGPT anonymously; they must sign up for an account, and that account saves all of their ChatGPT history. Using the chatbot involves students and teachers sharing data and potentially sensitive information at the individual and institutional level. This raises concerns about data privacy and security.
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Competitors
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ChatGPT has a growing list of competitors as more large tech companies enter the NLP space. Their competitors include Google's Bard, Microsoft's Bing, Jasper AI, Replika, and Codewhisperer.
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Ethical Considerations
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As with any artificial intelligence that is being created and used, there are ethical considerations for using ChatGPT in education. One is that of access and digital literacy; some students might fall even more behind who do not have such access and cannot benefit from the AI model. Additionally, ChatGPT is not free of inherent biases that are present in society, which causes concerns for how to use artificial intelligence while knowing that it will produce some biased outputs.
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As generative AI that uses NLP becomes more advanced, there will be more ethical considerations of how students should interact with it. How will it supplement or replace student-teacher interactions? How should students interact with the model, knowing that it is not sentient but still human-like?
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These threats span the logistical and the existential and will have to be addressed continually moving forward. OpenAI should continue to promote their chatbots and GPT APIs to be used in strategic manners that foster critical thinking rather than hinder it. They can provide toolkits for teachers to use to create lessons that use ChatGPT in a creative manner. Additionally, they can build modules that help educate students on the importance of critical thinking and how they can use ChatGPT to help them think deeply and create more than ever. They can also create a way to use the application anonymously or without sharing your data. In terms of ChatGPT's competitors, none of them are as established or widely used as their model. They also set the precedent in the industry and can claim the creation of the GPT model. Lastly, they can raise funds for courses in digital literacy and provide people of lower socioeconomic status with tablets so that then can use ChatGPT.
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