AI systems are evolving at lightspeed these days. They can help robots perform amazing acrobatics and slick dances. They can beat the world’s top Chess and Go players. They can also help students do their work. This is unfortunately sending shockwaves that are rattling the education sector.
AI chatbots like CatGPT, and now Google’s Bard, and soon Baidu’s Ernie Bot, can solve math problems and write essays in seconds. This AI technology is transforming cognitive work flows like no other tool in history. If you have played around with ChatGPT, you will know this is not an understatement.
The great fear is that students will offload their cognitive work and effort to this technology. They will cheat, copy and plagiarize. They will not learn. They will not be able to realize their own potential and contribute to society when they leave school.
But pandora’s box has opened, and there is no putting that AI power back in. So, we need to understand the pitfalls and accept the fact that lazy and unscrupulous people will exploit AI technology for the worse–like all previous technologies. Students will use this technology to do homework and find the path of least resistance to do their work. This is human nature.
However, AI chatbots can be leveraged to enhance productivity, learning, and especially teaching. Most education systems in the world, especially those starting in secondary school, put all students on the same factory line. Actually, it is more like a treadmill, which increases its angle of elevation and speed at unforgiving rates.
Unfortunately, many students fall off this treadmill. And most who stay on it, hold on for dear life. They barely keep up with the latest math formulas, history events, and English vocabulary. And if they are lucky, they pass their tests and get ready for the next formula, event, and vocabulary sets.
Let’s be clear: This is not the work of learning. This is non-stop high intensity interval training for the working memory. We all have the experience of studying hard for an exam, passing it, then forgetting most of the content after a couple of weeks.
Learning requires time and practice. If there is any hope of knowledge and skill going from short-term memory into long-term memory, then we need the necessary conditions of curiosity, interest, understanding and appropriate level practice. These are the non-negotiable must-haves, not nice-to-haves.
Here is where AI chatbots can be valuable.
With access to hundreds, and soon, thousands of gigabytes of internet text and knowledge, AI chatbots can become AI tutors helping students understand why a certain grammar or word choice is wrong, what step in that math solution was incorrect, and which people were the key actors in that historical period and why.
I wish I could have had access to an AI tutor/chatbot when I was younger doing math. I remember making mistakes in math and going back to the textbook explanation and sample exercises to try and figure out what I did wrong. Probably 90% of the time I gave up after a few frustrating minutes of not seeing the pattern.
But what if I had had a tutor chatbot who could have looked at my mistake and not just tell me where I went wrong but also how to do it the right way?
I would have found it much easier to understand, and I would have been more interested in doing more practice with this patient, all-knowing guide. Perhaps studying would have been more like playing a video game instead of trying to keep up on a treadmill going way too fast.
Imagine if all children could comfortably do homework by themselves without so much stress and frustration. Imagine if all children–or anybody–could find studying satisfying and enjoyable.
This would be more like playing an interesting video game. This is when “studying” would become “learning”. This is the promise of AI tech for education.
School administrators and teachers should be less worried about students cheating. Instead, they should be thankful for these new tools to better help them do their real mission–help students learn.
Very few teachers, for whatever reason, have the power to instill curiosity in their students. Perhaps they simply focus on teaching as transmission and not learning; perhaps it is because they have too much pressure to “teach” too much material.
But if teachers can learn how to train their students to use AI chatbots, studying can start to become less like a high intensity interval training for the working memory, and more like a curiosity-driven video game that allows the student-players to level up their learning with a chatbot learning partner at home.
When this happens, more students will finally be able to “learn.” When this happens, more people will be able to fully realize their own potential and to contribute more to society.
Note: This article was revised and published in the Taipei Times, Saturday February 18, 2023.
