ChatGPT: The Educator’s New Dilemma

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot, capable of producing short and long form written communication. Unlike previous iterations of AI-powered chatbots, ChatGPT produces essays, blog posts, and other forms of written communication that are almost indistinguishable from those written by a human being. When the service was launched in November of 2022, educators and parents immediately recognized the challenges ChatGPT presented for learning and writing. Thanks to this advancement, students could ask ChatGPT to write an essay, set parameters for the assignment, and provide a word count, and ChatGPT could write the essay for the student. On this episode of #DevelopingClassicalThinkers, Winston Brady speaks with two Thales College professors–Peter Forrest, Dean of Humanities and Phillip Johnson, Professor of Engineering and Mathematics–to work through all the challenges presented by ChatGPT. Such challenges included not only the opportunities for plagiarism but also the likelihood students may cease researching topics and instead rely on the machine–ChatGPT–to do their thinking and researching for them. Along the way, they discuss the amazing gifts we humans have for creativity and originality, what it means to be human, and the implications of teaching against the machine.