Last month, I was invited to do a sharing on “Leveraging ChatGPT in Teaching and Learning” at a gathering aimed at educators in my fraternity. It seemed that I was one of the forerunners of this technology.
As a harried teacher, I use ChatGPT a lot in my daily work. Nonetheless, as I was creating a poster on Canva to complement my sharing, I was surprised to see a feature “Magic Write” being incorporated into the system. Another related incident - my colleague got me to download an app called SwiftKey. It granted me access to Microsoft Bing, which could rewrite my WhatsApp text messages in any tone that I fancied. Generative AI is really a game-changer.
Now that my sharing is done and dusted, I can’t help but ponder about the hidden effects ChatGPT and other chat bots could have on our lives. Since these platforms can rewrite our prose, the shift has suddenly changed from honing our writing skills to crafting effective prompts for ChatGPT. Outsourcing the heavy lifting of ensuring that our prose flows fluently. Not cracking our brain cells to express our inner voice anymore.
Honestly, I am appreciative of how ChatGPT can help to polish my emails to the entire school staff within minutes. It prevents me from making embarrassing mistakes due to lapses in tone. However, when it comes to my personal writing, can I in all good conscience accept ChatGPT’s edits as my original work? Even if I prompt it to preserve my inner voice, do I really claim full ownership of the final product ChatGPT churns out?
Yet, society is moving ahead at a relentless pace. Everyone is striving to beat the competition. No one seems to ponder about such existential issues. One of the largest local banks in my country, OCBC Bank, has launched its own version of ChatGPT for its employees. It can serve multiple purposes, helping staff to write code, make summaries of voice calls and financial reports as well as extract information from company documents. The gauntlet has been thrown. Jump on the bandwagon or risk being left behind.
As a teacher, I am not that conflicted about ChatGPT though. My job is to prepare my students to lead happy and healthy lives when they grow up. So, this means preparing them to adapt according to where the winds of circumstance blow them to. I do use ChatGPT in front of my students; I believe my value-add lies in guiding them how to write effective prompts.
As a passionate wordsmith, I remain skeptical of the impact ChatGPT will have on my muse. Just yesterday, I compiled a list of paragraphs ChatGPT had generated to improvise my writing and asked it to pick up the top ten nouns, verbs, adjectives and collocations it used for the rewriting. I noticed that it has its biases - it likes to suggest words like “captivated” and “enchanting” to improve my writing. I want to remain fully cognisant of its preferences so that I don’t unwittingly produce repetitive writing.
This reflection was 💯 human-generated, warts and all.
Your thoughts are appreciated and thanks for sharing. One also needs to remember what happened initially to Google searches, we were in awe, and for a good reason, only a short while later to discover how much data is being collected and distributed with or without our consent. The privacy concern is that the same will happen with ChatGPT if it is not already happening. Especially when it is introduced between you and the recipients of your emails. As you have witnessed already it tries to influence your writing, your thoughts could be next. This thing can correlate events, places, and people with ease and storage is very affordable these days. I'm not saying they do that, I'm saying they easily can and no one will stop them. I'm trying hard NOT to play data privacy freak with myself but I'm afraid I'm losing this battle... :-) I thought I would share...
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Thank you for your response. What strikes me is how overuse of ChatGPT may lead it to it influencing my thoughts. Shudders. I can imagine how it may very well happen because I outsource my thinking to it to complete tasks fast. But is efficiency always necessarily the best goal? Time to think
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Nice reflections. To me, generative AI long-term has one role only. It should be to act as our interface with other specialised and narrowly trained AIs. To help in writing better prompts itself.
There’s just no way, that one AI can be better at general tasks than another that is highly trained. One that is built for a completely bespoke purpose. One that is trained on a very rich and restricted dataset.
Generative AI can be better than us, sure, but it is not optimal or going to lead to groundbreaking results that we may see by using more specialised ones.
There’s no way we would trust the talent of the average doctor in the world, to fix our very specific problems, to be our surgeon, when the world is full of extremely talented and specialised doctors that have been trained to specifically solve the problem(s) we are experiencing. That original doctor’s only role should be to present options to us and to find the path to the best doctor in the business for us.
Using generative AI (ChatGPT) and expecting it to solve all our problems, and to do so better than us, and in our style, and to not mislead us, when it knows we are seeking its advice, is asking a little too much I feel.
OpenAI is going to fail in their endeavours. I have reached that conclusion recently. The future is us training our own models in my opinion on our own datasets, or leveraging those found in the market that have generated the types of results we are looking for. No walled garden can outcompete that.
ChatGPT is going to continue to be loaded with ballast and sandbags, that drags down the quality of its output. You have already seen that with their models. The number of parameters for an organisation like theirs is going to decrease in usefulness not increase IMHO. Even if it allows you to upload docs, interface with databases etc.
The role of education I hope would be on training models in my opinion, not just prompts. If we want AI to think like us but be better than us, consistent quality results depend on taking control of the inputs. Not just requesting new outputs.
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Great thoughts here. I particularly like what you say about having realistic expectations of AI. This week, I kept asking ChatGPT to help me generate dingbats for an Escape Room activity. I felt frustrated not getting what I needed. I thought the problem was with me - not knowing how to prompt accurately. Eventually, I realised that maybe it just didn’t have the capacity to create dingbats yet. It made me shudder. I have been putting ChatGPT on a pedestal and treating it like some kind of infallible God
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This is something I've been thinking about. I haven't touched many Ai programs because it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth from the uncertainty of the changes it will make to the conflict in genuine work vs ai prompts, which you mention here. Also the speed is alarming to me, as it is for you. My stance now is that my personal writing means more to me to pursue and to struggle through than whatever time ai can save me. I am just watching it play out. I've only used chatGPT to summarize legal documents, which I recognize is useful and wonderful. This is just to say it is a nuanced issue, one that I am thinking about too. Cheers, thanks for sharing
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As masochistic as it sounds, the struggle during writing is the true reward, isn’t it? Thanks for sharing my sentiments. It makes me feel less alone
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interesting thoughts, and I think you are experiencing what we all are experiencing. That is why your words ring true. I am believer that even though Ai does a lot of work for you and improves your work. the net effect is that you improve as well. For example when you use a spelling corrector, after you have been corrected 2-3 times on the same word, you automatically spell the word correctly afterwards. that is what is happening to us with AI at a much higher level
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Thanks for your response. You effected something in me. After reading your response, I went back to my last chat with ChatGPT and made mental notes of the changes it had suggested so that I can learn from this experience for good
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