Face Off: Should ChatGPT be allowed in school?

As the powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT sweeps the internet by storm, educators have raised fears of AI-driven cheating, sparking alarm worldwide.

In the US, public schools in New York and Seattle have blocked ChatGPT from their Wi-fi and electronic devices. In Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong and Baptist University have announced bans on using ChatGPT and other AI tools for coursework. Nevertheless, I stand that schools should not ban the tool. Instead, they should embrace this as a challenge to human intellect.

Rather than launching an endless war against an ever-expanding army of AI chatbots, we should welcome this new reality into the classroom and use it to help students become knowledge transformers.

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Just as calculators have become an important tool for students in maths classes, ChatGPT has potential for writers who want to hone their critical thinking and communication skills.

For example, students can use ChatGPT to generate outlines for essays, using the tool to create points for comparison and prompting students to develop critical thinking skills based on the outlines generated by the programme.

It can also serve as a tutor to help students revise, act as a debate sparring partner, or be used by English language learners to improve their basic writing skills. If used constructively, ChatGPT can facilitate deeper, more engaged learning.

Teachers can also benefit from the technology by using it to generate personalised lesson plans for each student, ideas for classroom activities, and quizzes. They can also use the platform to teach critical thinking and problem-solving skills by having students challenge ChatGPT’s reasoning in its answers.

Teachers should see ChatGPT as an opportunity rather than a threat to student learning as long it is integrated with substantive, in-class discussions.

We have entered a new era of technology: the era of AI, which is increasingly driving human behaviour and decision-making. We should welcome AI’s benefits to education. ChatGPT can be an invaluable platform for students even as they navigate its perils and shortcomings, helping them become ethical stewards of technology.

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Humans have benefited from the exponential rise of technology, which allows society to run smoothly and undergo massive undertakings like creating heavy-duty rockets and microchips thinner than a strand of hair.

ChatGPT is the most recent piece of technology to make waves, allowing us to learn more about AI than ever before. However, this raises a serious question – should we allow the use of ChatGPT in schools?

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The first pitfall in allowing the technology is that it can hurt students’ learning. ChatGPT can write well-articulated essays and solve complex maths problems in seconds. Unfortunately, this incentivises students to abuse the programme. According to Whitney Shashou, founder and adviser at educational consultancy Admit NY, “With a tool like this at their [students’] fingertips, it could muddy the waters when evaluating a student’s actual writing capabilities because you’re giving kids potentially a tool where they could misrepresent their understanding of a prompt.” This makes it difficult for students to work on their critical thinking skills and for teachers to assess their development.

ChatGPT can also generate racially biased or inaccurate information. According to the CEO of OpenAI, “ChatGPT is incredibly limited but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.” Meanwhile, one Forbes article stated: “The algorithm also has bias problems, given that it was trained on vast amounts of data pulled from the internet. It can render racially biased content.”

In fact, when asked for a way to assess the security risk of travellers, it calculated higher risk scores for Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans than other airline travellers.

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If ChatGPT were used in school, false and biased information like this could have a detrimental effect on marginalised students. This would only worsen inequality in an already fragile education system.

ChatGPT may have its fair share of advantages, but the possible negative impacts are too catastrophic for even those with the most vivid minds to imagine. Banning ChatGPT at school is the morally correct thing to do, and the best thing for students.