ChatGPT and Education: An opportunity or threat?

Hyderabad: Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a vital role in human lives. In recent times, one of the latest US-based AI tools, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), gained popularity as it triggered an intense debate on its influence on the education system and whether it is a boon or bane for students. According to educationists, use it as a tool to streamline students' routine tasks but don't be dependent or be a slave to it, as they fear that this can hamper the learning process.

Few educationists pointed out that this tool has been banned in one of the universities in Bengaluru, including many schools, colleges, and universities in New York. In Hyderabad, any such instance of rampant use of ChatGPT has not been reported yet, as many are unaware of it let it be students/teachers or professors, but they are quite concerned that in the future, this can pose a major challenge in the teaching field.

Prof Srinivasulu, an educationist, said, "Artificial Intelligence is not going to stop with ChatGPT or any other AI technology-based platform, it is going to become a necessity to avail in the future. The user needs to exercise his/her discretion when they are using it, they should be clear about the modalities of it, if a student becomes too dependent on it to write an essay or to solve a basic numeric problem that is wrong, we can just take an idea from it and express in our own words. This should be used only as a tool for preliminary information; students should not be completely dependent on it."

Talking on how this tool will benefit teachers, Ahmed Khan, an educationist and government school teacher, said, "ChatGPT can help teachers streamline their lessons and provide their students wide information in a particular subject, especially this is going to be a boon to language and mathematics teachers or professors. The risks of plagiarism, inadequate originality, and over-reliance on the model are real challenges for students conducting research with ChatGPT and in this regard, educators should guide students on how to make the right use of this application."

Speaking on how this tool is going to affect the education sector Dr A Patrick, professor of Commerce, Osmania University said, "This tool is going to disrupt the education sector. The students are always apprehensive when they are assigned some projects or assignments, with the invention of this tool, it has been seen that students have been dependent on it but any such instances have not been reported in Telangana."

Normally what Google has been doing is that it has been helping people to get closer to the information, but this tool is very crisp, and it almost resembles human thinking, it is giving very close answers. In the coming days, this tool can hamper the natural thinking of school and college-going students. As we cannot stop the penetration of these tools into the education sector, in the future there will be more advanced AI tools posing several challenges, he added.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by San Francisco-based AI research company. Launched in November 2022, it can have conversations on topics from history to philosophy, generate lyrics and suggest edits to computer programming code. Just within two months of its launch, it reached 100 million users.