ChatGPT and Other AI. What Does This Mean for Education These Days?

Surely you have heard of ChatGPT, and perhaps some of you have already used it. This is an artificial intelligence-based chatbot that can write a script, text content, and even create poetry in a matter of seconds. Moreover, you can “argue” with the chat in real-time, as if you are having a live correspondence with a friend, and, believe me, its answers will not be banal and primitive.

This bot appeared in November 2022 and immediately took over the whole world. OpenAI, which developed this technology together with Elon Musk, opened up a cool robot assistant for users and, at the same time, created a certain threat to education. 

Students have started using artificial intelligence to write their papers. Unfortunately, the result is not positive for them since ChatGPT and other similar programs cannot yet write high-quality texts. Students receive low marks for their essays and other papers. To prevent such a result, it is better to use writing services like https://payforwriting.com/. Professional writers, real people who work there, who know exactly what a good essay should look like.

The crisis of the old education system. What’s next?

ChatGPT and similar services put students under the great temptation to cheat and use chat to complete their homework in a few mouse clicks. Indeed, why spend a lot of time searching for information on the net and systematizing it? Enter a request into the chatbot that a team of specialists has been training for writing such articles for a long time; wait a few seconds and you’re done! You have an essay in your hands, although it is not written in completely lively, coherent language. Of course, it will differ from what you would write yourself.

Texts created by the ChatGPT successfully pass an anti-plagiarism check, and it can be very difficult to prove that they were written by a robot. And ChatGPT is only the first attempt to widely introduce such technology into mass use. We can expect that this phenomenon will only develop and gain momentum. Therefore, now in education, such simple forms of knowledge control as tests, writing an essay, or a research paper are no longer relevant. Even presentations will no longer be an objective criterion for testing knowledge because artificial intelligence can find information, structure it and arrange it in slides instead of a student. The question arises: how should the educational process respond to such technological progress?

Now the old education system is undergoing a significant crisis, and in order for the process of obtaining knowledge to be adequate to the challenges of the present, we must radically reconsider the approach to what the current teacher and the educational process itself should be.

The radical transformation of the education system

The world needs a radical transformation of the very essence of the education system. Now the main task of the teacher is not to give knowledge and not even to check the student’s mastery of the material, but to give the student themselves the opportunity to take the initiative in learning, effectively use the information received, combine it and apply the result in solving their task. A successful student must learn to solve complex problems that are at the intersection of different subjects and disciplines. Current educational processes should develop a cross-disciplinary and practice-oriented approach in them.

What will it look like in action? From modern graduates as future specialists, employers expect the ability to look at a work task from different angles and find a non-trivial solution for it. This includes the ability to work in cross-functional teams, where each member is a specialist in their field. Most often, for such cooperation, students need knowledge and competencies from different professions and simply the ability to perceive arguments from representatives of different specialties with different views and integrate these proposals into a common team project. But the main task of every successful specialist who wants to take place in such a team is the ability to think with their own head, turn on critical thinking, analyze information, and integrate their share into a common whole for a specific task or project request. This cannot be done by a robot and not a single chatbot (yet).

But for those who want to remain a “narrow specialist,” the news, unfortunately, is disappointing. By and large, the work that junior specialists are doing now, with the development of artificial intelligence, is actually becoming unnecessary. A chat like GPT or neural networks like Midjourney are already doing the job of primitive designers and copywriters, which you don’t have to bother with much. For example, some people make extensive use of ChatGPT when creating test items to validate course material. So all specialists are faced with the task of developing their own uniqueness, flexibility, and multi-awareness if they don’t want to be replaced by a robot. “Evolve or die!” the new world tells us. So how can a future specialist learn and develop in order to stay afloat in the chosen profession?

New education: at the intersection of disciplines and meanings

There is only one way out – now specialists must be super productive and versatile in order to remain in demand and successfully compete with the development of artificial intelligence. There will no longer be a place for primitivism in training and work. Either you will learn how to use artificial intelligence in your work for higher productivity, or you know. 

Therefore, education should focus on complex tasks, for the solution of which the student must master mathematics, history, physics, and chemistry. And most importantly, they must actively interact with their classmates at the university and, together with them, look for ways to solve a particular problem. 

That is, we must move not from the topic, curriculum, or program, but from the problem, for the solution of which this or that information is needed. And it is not so important how exactly the student finds it: in a textbook, on Wikipedia, or asking for a ChatGPT.