Artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly integrated into our daily lives. From personalized recommendations to automated customer service, AI has significantly impacted our lives. One of the latest AI technology-based platforms to disrupt the industry is ChatGPT, a Machine Learning (ML)-based system that can understand and respond to human queries.
Varied concerns, need for moderation
Although ChatGPT is a promising technology in the education space, there’s still a lot of R&D work to be done to integrate it into existing systems and ensure that it aligns with educational quality, policies and standards. Furthermore, there are concerns about plagiarism, accuracy, the possibility of biases in algorithms and security when using AI in the classroom.
Although ChatGPT can be useful for students, it’s important to use it in moderation. Because, presently, ChatGPT is trained on a large amount of data, and it still depends on the accuracy of available data, which leads to limitations in its knowledge and understanding. This can lead to inaccurate or unreliable answers, especially on complex or nuanced subjects. Additionally, a student’s reliance on ChatGPT can stifle creativity and critical thinking skills.
ChatGPT helps streamline routine tasks, but don’t expect it to do all the heavy lifting in all areas in its present state. It might not be the best tool for the job if you’re looking to dive deep into a topic or solve a complex problem.
Ways to ensure teacher control
It presents a unique challenge to the current education system. The challenge for educators is to find a way to use ChatGPT without sacrificing teacher control. This is a complicated task, requiring a careful balancing act between human and machine learning. For example, a teacher understands a student’s strengths and lacunae. Accordingly, by teaching/discussing, the teacher navigates the student to understand the subject. Machines are yet to learn from this kind of human touch-based teaching.
One of the primary benefits of ChatGPT is that it can significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of teachers in generic subjects. It can help teachers save time and energy by streamlining the teaching process by providing tailored responses to students’ questions. This frees their time and energy to focus on more complex tasks, such as helping students develop problem-solving skills.
To be accurate and to avoid any possible biases in the output of ChatGPT, people may expect explainability from AI models. Basically, it means being able to figure out why the model made the decisions and responses it did. It’s important to make sure AI models are trustworthy and used ethically.
Questions over sustainability
As far as sustainability is concerned, advanced AI systems like ChatGPT require vast computational power and ongoing training, which can have a pretty big energy consumption and carbon footprint. And that’s definitely a concern for sustainability.
While ChatGPT is a cool technology with a lot of potential benefits, we definitely need to keep sustainability and explainability in mind as we move forward with it. We need to find ways to minimize the environmental impact as well as train young human brains to learn things to develop their logic and analytical skills by being less dependent on the machine and making sure that we’re using AI in a responsible and sustainable way.
(The author is Director, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore)
