Opinion | ChatGPT will force university education to evolve but it won’t make it obsolete

Name: Robot artist Ai-da addresses UK Parliament in historic first
Uploaded: 2023-01-24T17:30:10.000Z
Duration: 1 min 52 s
Description: Robot artist Ai-da addresses UK Parliament in historic first

There will still be a place for traditional educational methods, but universities must embrace technology

Educators should impart knowledge that is challenging enough for students to see it is worth the effort to produce a good essay on their own

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Students take the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination in Shek Kip Mei. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI advances does not necessarily herald the end of traditional education any more than calculators made arithmetic obsolete. Photo: SCMP

Henry Kwok

Published: 1:30am, 25 Jan 2023Updated: 2:23am, 25 Jan 2023

The world seems entranced by artificial intelligence. The recent controversy over ChatGPT and other apps such as Bearly.ai has prompted some academics to rethink teaching and testing. It is time to confront the question of whether our way of life will be at risk in future because of AI.

It is far too early to conclude that university education is outdated because of AI. In many ways, AI has already outsmarted human intelligence and it is futile to try to catch up with it. The real threat isn’t the AI technology itself but its potential impact on human behaviour and wider society.

As computer scientist and technology philosopher Yuk Hui said in a 2021 article, maybe the definition of AI already implies its limit because there is no generally accepted theory of intelligence and data, and AI is only one way to model it. This view echoes Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which corrected the aberration at the time that IQ was the only indicator to measure human intelligence.

Why is essay writing still important? For any learning to take place, people need a firm grasp of language, which is the symbolic tool to mediate thinking and express meanings in a real social context. We are no longer in the Middle Ages, but there is more than a grain of truth behind the curriculums of medieval universities.

Scholars learned the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) before the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) – that is, they learned the word before the world. Also, the format of essay writing presupposes that students communicate ideas and argue their points rationally in public, just as Martin Luther wrote up his theses to defend his theological views against the Catholic Church.

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Robot artist Ai-da addresses UK Parliament in historic first

However, the technology of ChatGPT assumes a very narrow view of learning, and universities have good reason to ban it. Why does this ghostwriting machine exist in the first place? The business model of ChatGPT is premised on two anti-education beliefs of which Elon Musk might be enamoured.

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