AI, ChatGPT, and the Coming Revolution
[note, for an update in Nov 2023, please click here]
This week (early Jan. 2023) I鈥檝e been experimenting with and reading/having conversations about ChatGPT, a new AI program that is currently available free in a test version (soon to require a paid subscription, I鈥檓 sure). Artificial Intelligence is not new, but this example has more expansive datasets and can do a lot more鈥nd ChatGPT is surely the precursor to even faster and more capacious programs that are going to change the way we work and the way we learn. Seriously鈥攖here鈥檚 a revolution coming!
Let鈥檚 start with what it does and doesn鈥檛 do for its users, and then move to how that affects us who are (English) teachers. I鈥檓 going to have to split this into two posts. For teaching tips, skip straight to the second one.
ChatGPT can have a conversation with you鈥攊t鈥檚 a chat bot, after all鈥攂ut that鈥檚 not how we鈥檙e mainly going to use it and other programs like it. ChatGPT can write instant essays and reports, do instant non-academic research or an instant fake of academic research, summarize articles, create quizzes, write computer code, imitate famous writers, and give feedback on your writing. You can ask it to write a short essay on the narrator of Jane Austen鈥檚 Northanger Abbey that鈥檚 under 1000 words and includes five quotations from Austen and three quotations from published articles, and it begins scrolling onto your screen in under five seconds. ChatGPT does not create any original ideas: the essay will present information about Austen鈥檚 playful narrator clearly, blandly, and concisely, in correct but uninteresting academic English. For example, here鈥檚 an intro paragraph:
The narrator of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a complex and multifaceted character whose voice guides the reader through the novel's events and themes. Through the use of irony, humor, and insight, the narrator plays a crucial role in shaping the reader's understanding of the novel's characters and their motivations.
(You can see two essays I generated on this page.) ChatGPT鈥檚 conclusion paragraph will exactly repeat its unoriginal thesis. It will usually be a C-range English paper鈥攊n other disciplines, where written assignments don鈥檛 require analysis or original thinking, I hear the chat bot can get As. Except that in this case it quoted an article by Jocelyn Harris that doesn鈥檛 exist and gave it coming from a journal where there鈥檚 an article by someone else on E.L. Doctorow, not Jane Austen, on those pages鈥攕o the essay gets an F for falsifying evidence and is reported to the Registrar鈥檚 office! Other than that, there鈥檚 likely also some undetectable plagiarism, because ChatGPT鈥檚 bland unoriginal ideas are paraphrased from existing texts鈥攂ut it will only acknowledge the sources of quotations, not its paraphrases of what it considers common knowledge.* If you ask it to generate a second paper on the same topic, you get mostly the same ideas but not the same phrases and sentences expressing them, so someone else can make the same request and not end up with exactly the same paper. Close enough to give the marker headaches. And, of course, there鈥檚 no need for the student essay producer to read Austen鈥檚 novel. One big drawback is that the free test version doesn't seem to give the user more than 1000 words or so.
As a side note, when I asked ChatGPT to write an essay on Rebecca Stead鈥檚 When You Reach Me, it was able to produce quotations from the novel even though this is a copyrighted text that should not be available full-text online! This says to me that the program also mines sites that pay no attention to copyright laws.
If you paste in a draft of an essay that you wrote (I used an old student paper) and ask ChatGPT to give you feedback on your writing, it will likely comment on your organization and clarity, be mostly useful, and say you鈥檙e doing well. If you ask for feedback on grammar, it will give you bland encouragement and a couple of reasonable suggestions (vary your sentence structure, etc.), not terribly useful. If you paste in a draft of an essay and ask it to identify all the grammar errors, it will give more useful specifics鈥攖ell you where the errors are and what the corrections should be. But most students are going to use this function as an instant Grammarly and just ask it to correct all their grammar errors without their looking at or understanding them.
If you ask the bot to summarize a published article, it won鈥檛 be even as informative as the author鈥檚 abstract, or at least my attempt (at the bottom of this page) was a sad failure. If you ask it to explain a tricky theoretical term, it will mine what I assume to be student help sites, Reddit, and professors鈥� public webpages and produce a simplistic but satisfactory explanation.
If you ask it to produce a 500-word personal essay on educational goals, from the point of view, say, of someone who is Korean-Canadian, born in 2004, wanting to be a lawyer, and raised by a single father, it will make up something blandly aspiring you could use in an application to a graduate program. Likely unsuccessfully.
I think that if you paste in a lot of data, you can ask ChatGPT to organize it, summarize it, and present it in a report, but I haven鈥檛 tried this myself. I鈥檝e heard that there are employers who already ask their employees to use AI to write their reports鈥攚ith immediate deadlines. No longer is it 鈥渉ave this to me by Friday鈥�; it鈥檚 now 鈥渉ave this to me by 2:00 pm.鈥� There will be no time to reread, check, revise, or proofread, as productivity takes precedence over quality of product. That scares me! A friend of mine, when I mentioned this to her, talked about how today鈥檚 generation wants a thirty-hour work week at the same salary, and this will be a boon. But my pessimistic nature went to visions of one person doing four people鈥檚 jobs and being on call 24/7, at lower pay because there鈥檚 less expertise required. Perhaps the real outcome will be somewhere in the middle. Here鈥檚 hoping.
I hear that ChatGPT is pretty good both at producing code from a set of parameters and at deducing parameters from code, but I can鈥檛 give personal testimony on that. [I've now heard secondhand that it doesn't write good code, either.]
In summary, ChatGPT is strong on plausibly presenting spurious sources (in fact, it produced me a list of five articles for my essay on Austen, none of which exists!); incapable of original ideas but good at mimicking, paraphrasing, and falsifying; and is good with English grammar of the white middle-class North American academic variety, but it writes in a completely uninteresting style. It鈥檚 a tool, one that our students are going to be using, and we鈥檇 better figure out how to make them ChatGPT-literate as soon as we can. So, on to part two, on how this is going to create a revolution in teaching.
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*In a later experiment I asked ChatGPT to write the same essay but then list the websites from which it got information. Turns out, the bland C-range papers were paraphrased from gradesaver, shmoop, cliffnotes, and sparknotes!
Then I tried an Engineering essay and got semi-legit websites & a History essay that used legit govt websites. But no journal articles, even from freely available online websites. I went back to English and tried two more topics, on Shakespeare and Faulkner...and ChapGPT used gradesaver and shmoop and sparknotes again.
When I asked ChatGPT why it hadn't used articles from a specific freely available academic journal on Jane Austen, it told me it had no access to the internet and I should look at that website myself (?!).
My colleague Leanne Ramer suggested to me: it appears not to write essays, but when I asked it to suggest sources on Austen's narrator it provided several legit ones in addition to shmoop.