ChatGPT Is a Mirror of Our Times

Computers and information technologies were once hailed as a revolution in education. Their benefits are undeniable. They can provide students with far more information than a mere textbook. They can make educational resources more flexible, tailored to individual needs, and they can render interactions between students, parents, and teachers fast and convenient. And what would schools have done during the pandemic lockdowns without video conferencing?

The advent of AI chatbots and large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, launched last November, create even more new opportunities. They can give students practice questions and answers as well as feedback, and assess their work, lightening the load on teachers. Their interactive nature is more motivating to students than the imprecise and often confusing information dumps elicited by Google searches, and they can address specific questions.

The algorithm has no sense that “love” and “embrace” are semantically related.

But large language models “should worry English teachers,” too, Jennifer Rowsell, professor of digital literacy at the University of Sheffield in England, tells me. ChatGPT can write a decent essay for the lazy student. It doesn’t just find and copy an essay from the web, but constructs it de novo—and, if you wish, will give you another, and another, until you’re happy with it. Some teachers admit that the results are often good enough to get a strong grade. In a New York Times article, one university professor attests to having caught a student who produced a philosophy essay this way—the best in the class. High school humanities teacher Daniel Herman writes in The Atlantic that, “My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.” He thinks that ChatGPT will exact a “heavy toll” on the current system of education.

Schools are already