EDUCATION is as old as human language and gets improved as the rising of tomorrow’s sun. Education is a powerful weapon used to fight ignorance, which is a disease. It is a pillar that holds every sector in the world and cannot be jettisoned. In many ways, it has transformed numerous countries all over the globe. In antique times, education thrived on the legs of horses, but now in the era of advancements in technology, it is thriving on the wheels of a jet. It has not only improved the economic sector but also put the dark ages behind. The mind is being trained to create and recreate ideas, the hands are being trained to be skilful in a better way. All of this sums up to where the world is today. Archaism in the educational system is gradually being dispelled while a lot of sophisticated application and websites are being invented. This is speedily driving education to a predicted future of robotics. One of the newest inventions is the ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer), an Artificial Intelligence application. However, amidst the innovation of ChatGPT, what is the future of education? What are the opportunities that accompany the use of this application? What are the challenges looming on the educational scheme?
To begin with, ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) is a natural language processing tool driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that allows users to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can give answers to questions and aid users with operations such as composing essays, emails, codes, among others. The usage is currently accessible to the public free of charge due to the fact that it is in its research and feedback collection phase. It was created by Open AI, an AI and research company. The company launched it on the 30th November, 2022.Also, the use of ChatGPT has numerous benefits and opportunities. It has the potential to revolutionise learning due to the fact that AI can personalise learning by tailoring lessons to individual student’s needs, providing immediate feedback and offering guidance. Chatbots like ChatGPT can engage students, answer their questions, and grade assignments as the demand for e- learning grows. It can also collect and analyse data on students’ performance, thereby making learning more accessible and effective. Also, it provides learners with access to vast amounts of information that they may otherwise not have access to. This will help learners as well as teachers to widen their horizon and help them to discover new information that may be useful in their academic or professional pursuit. Furthermore, it makes learning to be more accessible to students with disabilities, which helps them to achieve academic success. This breaks the limit to the quest for knowledge or scarce of information as learners could get various sources of knowledge and information through ChatGPT.
Furthermore, ChatGPT is an invaluable tool that helps to generate ideas for assignments, lesson plans, and other activities. It evaluates and improves the quality of written work. It also facilitates virtual classrooms. Teachers build interactive quizzes, games and other engaging activities to enhance regular teaching approaches with the help of ChatGPT. Additionally, experiments have shown that it can compose music and create fiction such as short stories. Content creators or technical writers can use this tool to create an outline. Besides summarizing, digesting and explaining long texts, the chatbot can also summarise and digest short texts. As another interesting use of ChatGPT, you can write and debug computer programmes with it. By leveraging on ChatGPT’S search function, users find information related to their query faster without much consumption of time and money.
According to Bill Gates, ChatGPT is one of the two technological advancements he has seen that struck him as revolutionary in his lifetime. Gates says when he witnessed the capabilities of ChatGPT, “The whole experience was stunning.” He continues: ‘This inspired me to think about all the things that AI can achieve in the next five to ten years. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get healthcare and communicate with each other.” Gates further says: “Entire industries will reorient around it. Business will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.” Therefore, the educational sector leveraging on the various opportunities provided by ChatGPT will enhance learning and productivity. Also, the future of education cannot be limited as ChatGPT exposes leaners and teachers to sources of unlimited information. However, despite the numerous opportunities that Chat GPT provides, the fact that it has some challenges cannot be ignored. Invariably, it affects the educational system so badly, hence pointing to a gloomy future. One of the drawbacks is its absolute dependency on technology. This is a potential downside to using ChatGPT. Many learners abuse the use of ChatGPT; they copy and paste answers verbatim from it. This will breed laziness, brain dormancy and mental incompetence. Also, critical thinking is gradually going into extinction as many learners and teachers depend overly on the use of ChatGPT. Consequently, scholarship will become poor as learners are not giving out (contributing ideas) but only feeding on what has been done by existing scholars.
Also, many educational experts have raised the concern that ChatGPT ‘diminishes learners’ efficiency in absorbing new things’. The concept of research is gradually dwindling as ChatGPT provides instant answers to most of the learners’ assignments. ‘Reading, Research, Rigorous learning’ in scholarship is being replaced with ‘get work done by smartbots-ChatGPT’. This has made countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea and Italy, among others, to place a ban on the use of ChatGPT in their domains.
Influx of biased data generated by ChatGPT is also inimical to education industry, since most content are derived from the internet and the chatbot’s proficiency to generate responses based on previous input depends on the quality and quantity of data it has been trained on. This leads the machine to produce flawed, unreliable and inaccurate responses. Therefore, this brings a significant challenge in the academic setting in which reliability, efficacy and accuracy is predominant.
Equally, ’ChatGPT is high-tech plagiarism; it undermines education’ For years there have been programmes that have helped profesors to detect plagiarized essays. Now it is going to be more difficult because it is easier to plagiarise’ said Noam Chomsky. He dismissed ChatGPT as a way of avoiding learning for students. This statement made by Chomsky foreshadows the future of education as one in which copyright will be devalued and plagiarism becomes the other of the day. This will really wreck scholarship as plagiarism would not be penalised for the reason that, students both in junior and higher level of their education cannot be pinned down for the offence of plagiarism.
In conclusion, the era of ChatGPT has brought a lot of opportunities to the educational system such as versatility, accessibility of information, low cost of time and money and among other as mentioned above. However, ChatGPT has its own cons such as biased data, undetected plagiarism, devaluation of critical thinking and independent learning which is capable of wrecking the future of education. This challenges renders the importance of education in its real form invalid. The era of ChatGPT in education might experience some legislative restrictions as some countries have already taken actions to preserve the legacy and integrity of education.
ChatGPT proffers a source of breath and knowledge bank to the future of education and at the other side, the future of education may lack new development of ideas and critical thinking and evaluations among learners. This may not be a balanced future for the educational industry thereby, affecting and depreciating the value of knowledge in all sectors of the globe.
- Olusola is a 400 level student in the Department of English, University of Ibadan.
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