I, Chatbot

“‘Not when you’re looking back at them,’ she said. ‘You wonder how they vanished so quickly.’” — Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

Preface

Note: Much of this post was written near the date of 2022 Nov 29, before GPT-4. I delayed publishing this post because I felt it was not complete and didn’t find time to return to it until now.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an improvement on GPT 3.5, a large language model by OpenAI. Basically, ChatGPT allows the user to have a conversation with it, and will answer any questions or prompts to the best of its ability. For example, it can write poems, math problem solutions, code, music (chords and lyrics), and so much more.

Below is a prompt I have given it:

Explain the fundamental theorem of calculus in a way that a 5-year-old could understand

Its response:

The fundamental theorem of calculus is a really fancy math concept that helps us figure out how fast things are moving. Imagine you have a ball and you roll it along the ground. The ball can go really fast or really slow, and the theorem helps us figure out how fast it's going at any given time. It does this by using two special ideas from math: calculus and the concept of a function.

Calculus is a way of figuring out how things change over time. For example, if you know how fast a ball is rolling at one moment, calculus can help you figure out how fast it will be rolling a little while later.

A function is a rule that tells us how one thing is related to another. For example, we could have a function that tells us how the ball's speed changes as time goes on. This function would take a time (like 1 second or 2 seconds) as input, and it would give us the ball's speed at that time as output.

The fundamental theorem of calculus says that if we know the function that describes how the ball's speed is changing, we can figure out how far the ball has traveled by adding up all of the tiny changes in speed over time. This might sound tricky, but it's actually a really powerful idea that helps us answer all sorts of questions about how things move and change.

So, to summarize, the fundamental theorem of calculus is a way of using calculus and functions to figure out how fast things are moving and how far they've gone. It's a really important idea in math and science, and it can help us understand all sorts of things, from the movement of planets to the flow of electricity.

While a 5-year-old probably could not understand the above explanation fully, it is probably better than most math teachers could do it. For the sake of argument, the major assumption of this post is that ChatGPT and its future variations will make the act of answering questions at a high level completely effortless on behalf of the student.

Adaptation

This is quite a scary idea. So much so that the science department at my school called a meeting to discuss what they are going to do about it. Basically, teachers will soon never grade out-of-class assignments ever again. This is pretty sweet, because no more homework!(?) Yay!(?)

In contrast, students certainly must work harder and smarter at school. Or, because teachers will still assign things outside of school to assess students on, it may lead to an increase in workload because

• There are two types of learning: passive and active
• More foundational knowledge must originate from outside of school, which will likely be passive
• More in-school time must be spent on active learning because the previous grades from homework (active) have been combined with schoolwork.

Basically, there will be no more creation out-of-school, only absorption.

Most affected fields of study

Common sense suggests that the humanities, English and social studies, would need to adapt the most as a result of ChatGPT.

English and social studies have attempted to escape from the world of tests in recent years. This follows from modern pedagogy which believes that interactive forms of learning are better than taking monotonously notes outside class and doing tests. Personally, I believe that this philosophy is generally good because it takes up less time from students and is less stressful since there are no tests. However, an important question is whether this approach actually leads to more efficient learning.

From my personal experience, having students research different literary lenses and then present to the class does not work because students will be too focused on their own lens to become proficient in most of the other lenses presented to them. For example, basically everyone my AP English Literature class has avoided structuralism because it is more complex than other lenses and a short presentation is insufficient for understanding it fully.

So, it’s likely that teachers must revisit every single assignment with this question in mind if they want to maintain the modern pedagogy: “How can I force students to learn even if they cheat? Ideally without using tests?”

It may be that this is impossible, in which case, the humanities may be forced to step back into the traditional notes + test format.

STEM will soon go into a variable-visual world

Revision

And that was where my writing stopped. After seeing GPT-4 in action, it was obvious that the claim of a variable-visual world is crushed by the advancement of ML models, since GPT-4 can even do math problems which involve graphs. Essentially, STEM is definitely not safe either, so every subject becomes the “most affected subject.”

So, what now? Well, still:

• No homework points for any class
• Only in-class assignments based on homework are worth points

However, nothing stands in the way of every student becoming a slave to the overuse of AI in their search for answers. As my computer science teacher, Mr. S said, an individual should only use ChatGPT to solve a problem if the only constraint is the workload required.

Teachers can only attempt to hope that students’ need for foundational knowledge in their pursuit of a better grade on assessments will lead them back to homework.