-Zoe Yu
Recently, ChatGPT has stolen the show on the media in the west along with Xi’s visit and summit conference in Saudi Arabia in the east.
Within its launch in 5 days, ChatGPT’s users had reached one million and the social media has been occupied with screenshots of people’s conversations with the AI. As I checked and read those conversations, I found them much more humanlike, sensible and even creative than what I had experienced with other AIs such as TmallGenie (Alibaba), DuerOS (Baidu) and Alexa (Amazon), not to mention Siri (Apple). It caused me to concern about its impact on language education for the future.
As it’s described on its official website and tested by numerous users, ChatGPT can answer questions with well-organised sentences and logical thinking, and it refuses to answer queries that are politically and militarily sensitive, confidential or socially and morally hazardous. In addition, it is able to create texts according to the user’s demand, conduct mathematical calculation and deduction and provide average level of computer programming. Moreover, it is capable of asking clarifying questions to debug the code in the programming and upgrade its response based on the historical input of the user. Many are in awe of what it can do despite that it also makes simple mistakes in mathematics, writes expressive but not persuasive enough passages and can be fooled by the users with tricks to answer questions it refused to answer for the first time. Whereas a small portion of them have started to warn against its potential negative effects on school education, especially language education, as that’s what its product motto—Optimising Language Models for Dialogue.
Kevin Bryan, a professor from University of Toronto, stated that “You can no longer give take-home exams”. Concurrently, a political scientist from the University of South Carolina wrote that “I think chat.openai.com may actually spell the end of writing assignments”. Some netizens also joked that they are no longer compelled by college essays as the ChatGPT has the proxy to do it perfectly. As for me, as a language teacher who’s already bothered enough by the situation where students are relying heavily on online resources and electronic devices in their English learning, it seems that something worse is at the corner: the students might just give up independent thinking and creative language production by themselves at all and turn to ChatGPT for answers to all the tasks distributed to them in and out of class. However, it also occurred to me that this might be helpful from another perspective.
I have memories where some students came to me and asked about how to improve their oral speaking in the social environment of most Chinese and a limited number of native speakers. I used to suggest them to try and find some phone applications which can talk back to the user or platforms where they can find pals to exercise their English for free, or even reach out to make friends with English speakers from other countries. But this yielded little success as those apps don’t work as intelligently as humans, and the pals they found online may also speak the language poorly and lead to ineffective peer learning. Moreover, daring themselves to make friends with unfamiliar foreigners from various backgrounds may also cast a shadow on their personal safety and mental security. While now with ChatGPT, it is highly possible that they could practice their spoken English with the AI which makes proper sense linguistically and in social and literary knowledge.
In a longer term, it could also help improve the source materials for writing instruction. As a matter of fact, although existing instructional books for writing practice are professional and systematic in topics and contents, they are more uniform than personalised. Therefore, many learners who aim to enhance their writing would make use of similar and popular guides to facilitate their own compositions. In this way, the essays they draft in the exams and academic language tests are often prone to be identical. But in reality, they actually each has their own style of writing, and it’s just that they don’t have enough vocabulary or a solid grammatical foundation to develop their ideas into paragraphs. With an assistant like ChatGPT, it is convenient for them to access a sample text written in a mimic of their own style and thus offering them some clues in how to create their own pieces. However, this needs to be done on condition of the students’ rigid self-discipline and positive motive to learn.
In terms of the teacher’s part in language education, it would seem more troublesome than beneficial to have such an AI so far, as it has similarly made the programmers panic for being threatened in their career prospect. Nevertheless, for teachers it is more about the distinguishing and management of students’ assignments: whether they are original works and how to protect them from plagiarism. But as OpenAI has set the ChatGPT as a seemingly rather moral role which doesn’t answer questions that are dispute-provoking, it may also has to and will consider its implication on education—the spiritual pillar of human beings, hopefully. And in a futurist view, some advantages may also be demonstrated for language teaching.
To sum up, it is always excitement riddled with fear when a new technology (not new actually) comes into being, but we still need to usher it in with an inclusive and critical mind and exploit its strength while mitigating the pitfalls.
References
[1] Bogost, I. (2022, December 7). ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think. The Atlantic.
[2] Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (2011). Digital technology, identity, and language learning. Identity, language learning, and social change. Language Teaching, 44(4), 412-446.
https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/783626133
[3] OpenAI (2022, November 30). ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue. Introducing ChatGPT research release.
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
[4] Roose, K. (2022, December 5). The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT—A new chatbot from OpenAI is inspiring awe, fear, stunts and attempts to circumvent its guardrails. The New York Times.
[5] Stern, J. (2022, December 8). Five Remarkable Chats That Will Help You Understand ChatGPT. The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-chatbot-messages/672411/
Hi Zoe,
Thank you for the post!
AI is definitely something that’d change the way people teach in the future, especially now that AI is capable of so many things, whether it be translating, paraphrasing, or even composing an essay. We cannot know for sure if the students wrote their assignment on their own anymore, so the question is: how do AI and education coexist? My thoughts are preliminary, I belive that teachers should bear in mind what AI is able to do, and learn how to distinguish an original piece of writing compared to what has been written by a bot.
–Rebecca Lin