This was said by Keith Quille , a senior lecturer at the Dublin School of Enterprise Computing and Digital Transformation, at the recently held Carnet conference TheCUC , dedicated to the digitization of higher education .
The focus of his work as a lecturer is machine learning, and in his lecture and workshop he managed to convey two seemingly contradictory messages – that artificial intelligence is not intelligent at all, but also that teachers and professors should not underestimate, reject, or fear it.
Teachers went on strike in 1984 over calculators
AI will certainly change education, Quille adds, primarily by requiring educators to think carefully about what they actually want their students to learn and how they will evaluate what they have learned.
I admit, I was one of the skeptics at the beginning of the year when there stockholder database were bombastic announcements about how the development of artificial intelligence would affect education and that, probably this year, professors would give up on assigning essays because students would cheat and ChatGPT would write the essays. I referred to the argument that the advent of pocket calculators did not lead to the fact that basic arithmetic operations were no longer taught in schools .
Quille also mentioned this argument – and recalled that in 1984 teachers went on strike worried that calculators would put them out of work – but he emphasizes that the AI tools that are now readily available to students are, just like the calculator – just a tool .
A tool that professors will integrate into the educational process , just as they did not so long ago with another tool that, he recalled, was the subject of a similar panic – the advent of the internet :
And then we were shocked that students suddenly had instant access to information. Today, information can be Googled in a matter of seconds, and no one expects students to leaf through encyclopedias and dictionaries anymore . Instead, we teach them how to efficiently find and critically evaluate information.
Artificial intelligence tools are just that – tools, just like the internet or spell-checking software.
ChatGPT and similar tools, Quille says, should be seen by teachers as just another tool available to them , like, say, spellcheckers:
Use ChatGPT, encourage students to use it , sooner or later someone will tell them that there is this software that writes essays for them. Show them how to use it to do the boring and tedious tasks for them, let it help them a little. Well, I use it when I write papers, who likes to write bibliographies?!
Assign them to use ChatGPT to solve a problem and then evaluate what you have learned together. Remember, it's just a tool, you are the expert and you are in control.
Testing is a process, not a result
It is equally realistic when it comes to essays or assignments written by ChatGPT or cheating on exams. Yes, there are numerous tools that detect whether a text was generated by artificial intelligence, but there are also numerous tricks to bypass them (if anyone is interested – it is enough to make a deliberate mistake or change a word in the resulting text or, with instructions, tell ChatGPT to generate text that a 15-year-old would write).
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