By now, you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the revolutionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that can do just about anything – from generating song lyrics to telling jokes and even writing full-fledged essays – at the click of a button. Developed by OpenAI, this tool marks a major milestone for the computing field, blurring the line between human and machine. Until now, an important point of distinction between human intelligence and artificial intelligence has been humans’ capacity for common sense, creativity, and expression. Now, AI is coming close to emulating these once uniquely human abilities. Free and open to the public, ChatGPT is smarter than the average high-schooler and can mimic sophisticated human speech. Because it can answer any question, even those that are opinion or stimulus-based, it has grown popular with students as a fast track to answers for assignments and exams. For students, this is a dream come true; for teachers, a nightmare.

Following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, some schools and universities embraced the program as a useful resource to both students and teachers. Others hurried to ban the program, fearing that it would lead to plagiarism of the chatbot by students. Universities began considering its usage an honor code violation. However, some of these schools have recently changed their minds after further consideration of the benefits – and the inevitability– of AI. Notably, New York City’s school system recently lifted its previous ban on ChatGPT, declaring it now supports integrating the technology into education and teaching students how to use it responsibly. 

Still, the matter remains controversial. Indeed, the double-edged sword of ChatGPT simultaneously encompasses potential to be both an opportunity and a threat. But what is certain is that AI like ChatGPT is here to stay. Banning it only provides a temporary fix, as it is bound to find its way into all aspects of our lives eventually. If anything, ChatGPT is a sign that we need to reform our education system. 

The disruption of education by technology isn’t new. After the invention of electronic calculators in the 1960s, math teachers learned to include them in their lessons, teaching students how to use them while also building basic skills without the use of a calculator. The typical math test became a mix of calculator-allowed questions and no-calculator questions. While being able to perform long division by hand might have been a necessary skill to become an engineer in the past, it is now calculator mastery that has become most important. The introduction of the Internet brought about similar change. Teachers redesigned their assessments to focus on soft skills like comprehension and application of concepts, rather than memorization of facts. After all, these soft skills would become even more important in the real world since they are one of the few things the Internet cannot do better than a human.

The same goes for AI: schools must shift their focus toward building soft skills and foundational understanding, which no AI can simulate. This can be done through lessons centered around team projects to improve communication, class discussions to improve critical thinking, and debates to improve argumentation. Teachers can focus on teaching the “why” over the “what”, since AI can do the latter but not the former. Additionally, it is now schools’ responsibility to teach students how to conscientiously use AI in the real world. This requires changing school policies to moderate the usage of programs like ChatGPT, instead of prohibiting them. It also requires training our teachers to guide students to use AI ethically, which includes understanding the risk of bias and misinformation that comes along with it. Some teachers are already beginning to incorporate ChatGPT into their curriculum, assigning students to ask the chatbot to generate an essay on a topic, then critique and revise it. 

Of course, cheating remains a problem for assignments that are not intended to use ChatGPT. Some programs like GPTZero and Originality.ai attempt to check for plagiarism of AI-written material in essays but are subject to both false positives and false negatives due to the nature of ChatGPT itself: even with the same prompt, the chatbot generates different answers every time and does not have any one “signature” writing style that is easy to detect. Teachers’ concerns about this are valid, and we may have to go back to using pen and paper on essays, a relatively easy fix since many teachers already do this. AI is in our future whether we want it or not, so all that’s left for us to do is prepare to use it responsibly. 

And who knows? This article just might have been written by ChatGPT too.