ChatGPT: a knowledge terminator or an advanced tool for education?
ChatGPT has managed to write a whole diploma work. A university graduate confessed it took the neural network 23 hours to complete a 100-page thesis for him, and the uniqueness of the work was 82%. The student earned a passing grade for it.
Hearing the university’s displeasure with the student’s using ChatGPD, ROBBO reacts by coming up with a few suggestions on how to effectively apply a neural network in our activities.
Generally, people would naturally resist novelties and hardly bring them into their lives ever. Even harder, should they admit any solutions that facilitate others’ activities, especially if the latter involve studies. A student is supposed to complete a work on their own, be that a thesis or a coursework, in order to get the precious knowledge. It is the goal of education, in fact.
At the same time, the technologies inevitably invade and capture our being, so sometimes it is rather useful to find a way to adapt them as a tool, rather than neglecting or even strictly denying. We in ROBBO are sure that the faster and agiler we can move towards them, the more pleasant and convenient the integration process shall be. Hardly would someone use beads for counting nowadays, yet some time ago accepting a calculator might also have been a challenge for certain mates.
An advanced search engine of the future
Now selecting the best tools for our activities, we should admit the neural networks like ChatGPD can partly replace the existing search engines, or even displace them after time. Given the search engines’ sabotage and decreasing of the search results relevance, this trend looks quite possible.
However, should the searchers improve their skills of communicating with the network therefore. It is crucial that the search queries are surgically precise for the system to perform correctly. One must formulate the topic, keywords and descriptors unequivocally, in order to get the proper result.
A hands-free solution
My older mates may remember how we collected materials for our studies a few decades ago. Imagine spending a half of a day visiting a library, aiming to find any fundamental matter to complete a paper. Nowadays, it should take several minutes to find anything with Google, and then way longer to filter the information and tailor it for our purpose.
Having the automatic transmission in a car, we are more flexible when driving (please, keep both hands on the steering wheel!). With automatic tempo adjustment, a Dj can pay more attention to the music and the dancefloor, rather than matching the tracks to mix up. Consequently, neural nets are promising to take over the ‘technical’ part of studies and clear more space for doing essential tasks, expressing creativity and thus getting more benefit from the education.
How to adjust education
As the neural networks become smarter, it is obviously a challenge to rearrange the process of education, so that it is still effective for students and provides them with necessary skills and capabilities.
Probably, the core solution is about creating an environment where students would be keen on doing practical things and applying their resourcefulness 100%. And a project-based educational approach is one of the options therein.
When teaching STEM, robotics and programming, in ROBBO, we have students divided by small groups to carry out their projects. The tasks they do go far beyond the capabilities of a neural network, so it can help make a part of a project — write a text, draw an image or make a diagram — but never complete the whole project. When doing teamwork, each student in ROBBO has their special role, so one of the roles may become about communicating with neural networks thereafter.
Hence, ROBBO stands for the neural network as a promising instrument in the hands of a human. Supplementing our natural intelligence, it can carry the burden of monotonous and time-consuming content-based work, freeing our hands for something more fruitful and morally satisfying. Yet, like any sophisticated tool, it requires special training for a person to interact with. So the ability to communicate with a neural network is about to join lots of vacancy descriptions quite shortly.