Instant Genius - How ChatGPT could revolutionise education, with Sam Illingworth

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

ChatGPT is a tool that can create essays, poems, full movie script and more from a simple worded prompt. We spoke to Sam Illingworth, an associate professor in the department of Learning Enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University to learn how it will change the education system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC Science Focus magazine, this is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Alex Hughes. staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine. This week we're talking about chat, GBT, and its newfound role in education. The artificial intelligence chatbot allows users to generate jokes, website design codes,

essays about complex scientific topics, and everything in between. With all of this available in seconds via a simple worded prompt prompt, there are growing concerns it could prompt plagiarism, misinformation, and cheating in the education system. I'm joined by Sam Ilingworth to discuss this issue. He's an associate professor in the Department of Learning Enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University. He tells me all about ChatGBT and its role in education

outlining why we should learn to embrace it and better understand how it works. So as ChatGBTGBT grows in popularity and interest, how much do you think it will implement itself into the education system? It's not just chat TBT, but all of these new artificial intelligence tools and machine learning that are rapidly finding a way into education. I think it very much depends on the level of education. So to some extent it might depend on whether we're in secondary schools or primary schools

or higher education. As tends to be the case with some of these things, we might see it proliferate first in higher education and then come down and certainly I'd feel most qualified to be able to talk about higher education. I think that we're already seeing some, I would say, knee-jerk reactions to this. Some examples of students may be

using CHAPGTPT in an unethical manner, but also ways of academics thinking about how we can use it as an opportunity as well as a challenge. And for me, you know, been ruminated on this for quite a while and talked to colleagues about it, it very much feels like weak and maybe later, much later, strong AI are here to stay. And that actually, why try to fight them? I mean, these are tools that our students will be using in the workforce. So it seems

very strange to me to almost say, but don't use them for three years. You know, let's just not pretend they're there and then you can go away and use them. These are things that have the potential, I think, to reduce workload, to improve efficiency. And our responsibility as educators is to think about how we can utilize them to help ourselves work more effectively and smartly, but also to prepare our students for the workplace and to ensure that they get the most effective and engaging and rounded education that they can. So when we're looking at these kind of tools,

do you think it's less so about trying to ban something or to tell people we don't use this, this isn't something we use, but instead to sit students down and explain, to them, okay, this is what this does and this is how we're going to use it in an effective way. I think when we work with our students with regards to what CHAPGPT is, it's really interesting to potentially pull apart what it's doing and why it's doing it. And I've heard lots of people say, well, only IT students or computer science students need to

know what's going on under the hood. And to some extent, you know, the things that are happening with machine learning algorithms and with weak AI like chat GPT require a level of complexity that not necessarily all undergraduate students would have. But I think it's important that we understand what the founding principles are and, you know, talk about what it means to be trained on a dataset, talk about what the limitations are, talk about what the ethical challenges are. So for me, I'm not really that concerned about. plagiarism. I mean, plagiarism is as old as the printed press. It's as old as the education

system. We recently had the idea of, you know, contract cheating and other ways of plagiarizing. For me, the bigger thing that we need to discuss is the potential bias of weak AI. So, you know, these things are ultimately trained on datasets. The CHAP GPT, arguably the data set is the whole of the internet, but we know that the whole of the internet is not necessarily a nice and certainly not an equitable place. So our students need to be aware, as to our colleagues, that any responses generated are biased by what goes in, and this will continue to proliferate. So if we're, for example, talking about the dominance of Western science, as opposed to other indigenous knowledge is, then if we continue to use chat GPT or other weak AI to generate responses to

questions, because that area, i.e. Western science, has more written space, has more, I guess, headline, has more front page, so to speak, it's going to continue to do so. So for me, we don't necessarily need to teach our students not to use chat GPT to plagiarize. because I think they know that. But rather we need to think about what are the biases that are implicit here and what does that mean and how and why should we challenge them.

That's interesting. So it's not so much about issues of plagiarism and cheating as it's about the actual content that it's producing. I think that's definitely true. And, you know, there's huge drives, rightly so, for diversifying the curriculum, decolonising the curriculum, making more equitable the curriculum.

And we're just starting to get our head around that. And there's a lot that we need to do to improve it. But the problem is that if we're just continuing to use things that are reinforced by these old ways that are colonial and that are systematically racist and misogynist, then that's just going to proliferate. With regards to plagiarism, I think it's a much deeper question. It makes me sad when people assume that all students do this, they don't.

If students are plagiarising, there's normally a reason for it. And as educators, we need to understand that. And there's been a lot in the press in the past few years about students who have entered into contract cheating negotiations where they pay somebody to do the work for them. And then those people blackmail them by telling them they're going to get in contact with their university or college. unless they pay them X amount of money. And that's horrific. So rather than throw the book at students,

we need to find out what it is. And similarly, there's a cultural thing here as well, so that some students come in from different cultures and from different countries. Plagiarism is different there, and the way that plagiarism is expressed is different. And there's a danger that, again, we can be very righteous in the UK and in the West,

that our approach is the best, Whereas actually what we should do is we should try and understand why our students might be using CHACT GTPT for plagiarism, not all of them. And talking about that and using that as an opportunity for open and honest dialogue, rather than saying you've used CHAPT, we're going to expel you from this course, or rather than assume from the beginning that all students are going to do this, because that's just not the case. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored job. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners, just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering,

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And that's a really good way of looking at it, yeah. And I think having looked at several examples of work and several examples of, creative writing as well. For me, I think it is sometimes obvious where CHAPGPT has created something. I often get it to respond just in testing to certain essay questions, and it delivers what I would, you know,

classify to be a good A-level response. You know, so a response of a good 16 to 17-year-old student. So let's present one side of the argument. Let's present the other side of the argument. and then let's have a neat conclusion at the end. Whereas we know when we go into higher education, we're expecting our students to do more than that, and we're expecting them to challenge,

and we're expecting them to analyze and to evaluate and to ultimately create as well. And I think that if you are worried about the plagiarism aspect of CHAP GPT, there's many different ways in which you can design assessments so that they can't be plagiarized. You know, we talk a lot in education about authentic assessments, and this is assessment that is useful for students and directly relatable to both their lived experiences

and also the kind of work that they're going to be doing in the workplace. So we might ask a student to write a essay about a subject, which theoretically could be plagiarised by weak AI, but we could put a tilt on it by asking them to contextualise that with their own experiences or with an event that happened to them in their lifetime. Similarly, if we were on a module or a program for which essay writing wasn't appropriate, we might instead think about doing live projects or projects that involved community work or working as part of a team in which you just couldn't generate or pre-generate an answer

because it was such an organic and evolving question as well. Expanding on what you were saying earlier, we mentioned issues around racism and the difference between different parts of the world, but the model in itself often makes mistakes in general format where if you offer it too many prompts, it can misunderstand or it doesn't have a knowledge after a certain time period.

There's also, I guess, the issue of, a level of misinformation spreading into education. If you use it to teach students or if students used it to create work or it's used to markings, that these kind of things could easily slip through. That's a really good point. And actually, I think that part of the role of education and certainly higher education is to equip our students with the confidence and the skills to challenge. And I'm not talking about, you know, scatter gun conspiracy theories here, but I'm talking about the idea that that you shouldn't take it face value anything that you read and that our students shouldn't be equipped with facts

when they leave the university. They should be equipped with the analytical skill set that they need to be able to make sense of the world around them, to question it, and not just to question facts, but also to question injustice. And therefore, when our students see politicians or sometimes journalists, making claims that are lacking logic or truth,

then we've equipped them with the skills to point that out similarly when they see responses that have been pre-generated by a machine as being grounded in falsity or bigotry or mistruth. Then I would hope that as educators we have equipped them no matter what their discipline with the skill set that's needed to question, to challenge, and to ultimately change. In a recent sort of period of TATGBT, they've announced that it's going to become a pay-to-use tool. So, I mean, it's been free for a while, but obviously, if the amount of money being poured into it, it was obviously at some point they start to charge.

Do you think that then raises some questions around equality where, if you're telling students there's this tool they can use, but they now have to pay a monthly subscription for it that separates some students. Definitely. And I think for want of a better phrase, the issue of digital poverty or digital equity is something that we really need to be addressing.

And on the one hand, we have this. So students who can access this, I mean, a little further down, we've had students who can pay for Grammally, for example, which is a fantastic online grammar editing software. But then we also have students who are able to, let's say, access Google's open computer coding software, like the pro version of it,

students who have the money to be able to access software for which the university doesn't have a license to, all the way down to what about those students who are unable to afford a reliable internet connection or who are unable to afford their own laptop? So if you think the whole gamut, and this is, you know, exasperated even further in secondary and primary school education, as we saw during the pandemic, it's all very good saying,

oh, well, students can learn in a virtual environment. But what happens if you've got one laptop between six siblings with a prepaid internet connection that's not very good? Or a prepaid electricity meter that has run out because of the escalating costs of electricity and power consumption in the UK. So you're absolutely right that this raises questions of digital equity. And I think it puts to the forefront again that actually the internet,

you know, it should be a right, not a privilege. You know, access to people often scoff at politicians who say, oh, well, why are you making high-speed internet freely available to everybody? That's like saying why you're making books freely available to everybody. entire history of human learning online. And it is a basic human right, in my opinion, to be able to access that internet and to be able to have access to it. And I think that the debates that we're having now around digital equity with regards to chat GPT, and I have to say that the marketing team there have played an absolute blinder in terms of how they made it free, got this incredible

publicity and then are charging. But it raises these questions that I think strike a much deeper chord with digital equity more generally and the role that that has in education. We're talking here mostly about, I guess, younger students. And I think that's where a lot of the conversation about chat, GVET and education is where students are in this stage of their life where they're learning creativity, they're learning important skills. And I think this is also where wherever or not it's true or not there is the most concern. about plagiarism. If you were to, I guess, jump right up the educational tree and you start looking at, let's say, a PhD essay or someone doing their masters where education is more of a choice

and where they've developed a lot of their core skills, doing that's where chat GBT in its format can be the most helpful in a way, where it's simply doing a little bit of heavy lifting in the background. It's helping people with the extra bits of work. might need to do on the side. Definitely. I think a very obvious way that you can get CHAPT to do work for you is, you know, referencing, you know, so you can give it a, you can say, here's a reference, please put it into this format for me. And I know that the software that does that in like document editing software as well, but it's a really neat way of doing it. Likewise, not just, it's a really great way to fill a blank page. And I use it for this sometimes,

definitely, you know, I'm, I'm a researcher. I'm also a poet as well. And, I find chat GTP actually pretty terrible at writing poetry. But it's a great creative spark. Because if you ask it to write a poem on a subject, most of it's absolutely junk. But there'll be one line in there where you think, oh, do you know what? There's a phrase or there's an idea that I can use. And similarly, if I want to write a literature review,

or if I want to write an introduction, or if I want to write a challenge on something or on an overview, it's a really great way of just getting something on the page. And then the role of the human is to go and to add that individual voice. So, you know, if someone was to look at my academic output, it would be very obvious if I was to just use chat GPT to write a paper for me because I have a unique voice, as all of us do. We have unique written and oral voices.

But exactly as you've highlighted, it's a really powerful tool to be able to do some of the, I guess, more administrative side of research and scholarly practice, providing, of course, that we make very clear what belongs to us. I mean, there's also an ethical dimension here in that CHAPGTPT is of, of course, given a response based on all of the input that's gone into it. So if you were to ask it a very bespoke question, then, there's a danger that it might only be able to draw on a couple or one piece of research and therefore it's plagiarising that. But I think that if you were to instead use it as a tool

to phrase broad questions or to do broad ideas, I think it is a really powerful prompt. And again, not just for scholarly pursuits, but as a seed for creativity, not to replace creativity, but as a seed. I don't think you see this as much with chat dvety, but it's been an issue of other I guess popular AI programs that to develop the problems that's doing and the work that's coming out of it, it's had to have taken ideas from somewhere else. So especially with images, there's been that problem where I guess you see watermarks and you see people's style coming through. I don't know how you think about this, but the idea that ChatGBTD is in itself plagiarizing other people. Do you think that then is a problem in itself? There's a self-perpetuating plagiarism

as it takes things and then someone else takes things from chat, GBT? I think that's a really good point. And I think that these are the reasons why with any tech, there needs to be like a serious ethical committee to talk about these things. So, for example, if you were to make your work freely available, either written or visual or creative, via a certain creative commons licenses, then it would be fair game. But you'd expect an acknowledgement as well. That's why I think that the way in which this does and the way in which you present the work as well is very, very important.

And even though some responsibility, a large responsibility, should lie with the people as in us, the users, a huge responsibility should also lie with the companies to make sure that as well as moving away from implicit bias and outright racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, we also need to make sure that it takes into account the fair use policy and that it is treating people's work in an ethical and appropriate manner. this is I guess the first major iteration of both chat gbt and any chatbot that works to this level but we're still fairly early on in the life of AI do you think there's then this risk of the technology blending in more and more over the years and then right now as you say it writes to a certain level

it can its mistakes can be quite obvious it's attempt of creativity can suffer. At what point is it that it just starts to blend in and it is hard to tell the difference? Well, I think it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, that this is why you can't stick your head in the sand and why you need to talk about these things and not just pretend that higher educational education exists in a bubble outside of society. It is society. And if instead we talk about the pros and cons, we use it. We challenge it, we investigate it, we analyze it, we create with it, then that won't happen.

You know, that analogy, I guess, of a frog in boiling water, if you put it into boiling hot water, it'll jump out straight away, whereas if you put it in and just ever so slightly raise the temperature or cook without raising it as an analogy, it's that, like, we need to be talking about these things. We need to understand what's going on. It's like saying the internet. We can't, even though, again, some countries do have precedence for this.

We can't just shut down the internet when there are exams on because we're worried about students cheating. It's about talking to our students, talking to our learners, engaging in open dialogue, talking about what the limitations of chat GPT are, what the opportunities are. And then also feeding that back to the creators of chat GPT to say, look, these are some of the challenges that you need to address, but also have you thought about using it in this way, as this is something that might have a deeply, profoundly positive impact

on education and the wider society? So let's zoom out and look at the future. Let's say five to ten years from now, maybe even longer. What do you see as the relationship of AI and education? How do we address the future of it and what should it educators be doing, do you think? That's a really good question. So I think it will depend very much on the educators.

I mean, let's look at the internet. I mean, do we, to what extent do educators sit down in a classroom and say, let's browse through the internet? That's not really what we do. It might have what we, it might have been what happened 30 or so years ago when the internet was first coming into fruition. But what I see, I see some educators won't have changed because that's what happens. I see innovative educators using this as an opportunity to challenge the limitations sometimes of assessment in education.

What is the purpose of assessment? Do we need to even have assessment in the first instance? How can we make sure that our students are equipped with the skills that they need to enter the workforce and to be more rounded and effective and happy citizens? and I'd hope that AI, rather than often in a panacea or ultimately, you know, being the devil or the devil in disguise to all of these things, is just part of that discussion. And if I'm thinking optimistically, I think that this will enable us to have some difficult conversations about what the role of education and in particular assessment is. and in a dream case scenario, I'd like to think that in 10 years' time, even though we're not necessarily all of us explicitly using AI on our assessments, the opportunities and the challenges with which AI have presented us have meant that we've created new ways of learning

that are more equitable, that are more engaging, and that are ultimately more authentic. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Sam Illingworth talking about how the chat, GBT, will affect the education system. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store.

Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music. Just as the artist intended.

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