(How) Will Generative AI Change Education?

Generative AI has many exciting benefits for the education sector but also poses opportunities for misuse. Here’s how to adapt — emphasizing reasoning, step-by-step thinking, and ethical AI

AI taking over education | Prompted On Bing

Key Takeaways

• Educators must think about whether to try to control or adapt to the new technology to minimize cases of misuse.
• Suggested solutions such as watermarks and classifiers (that identify AI-generated content) are flawed, and there is no obvious solution to this challenge.
• Course policies that ban products like ChatGPT would be difficult to enforce and also deprive students the opportunity to learn about a powerful technology that will be a significant part of society going forward.
• Therefore, instructors must adapt by emphasizing student reasoning and step-by-step thinking in coming up with answers or testing student mastery of course concepts. Reasoning is where humans shine and generative AI often fails making it a weakness that educators can exploit to reduce the likelihood of misuse.
• New updates to OpenAI show promise for crafting a game-changing high level language that will allow for more unstructured queries coupled with structured functions to give structured outputs (as opposed to the rigid structured query requirements of existing programming languages), making it far more user-friendly.
• With no easy answers, it will be important to educate students from primary school to higher education on how AI and programming languages work. This will help to maximize the benefits of the new technology while also building critical thinking, creativity, and reasoning skills.

Introduction

With the rapid rising trend of individuals and enterprises adopting generative AI products comes concerns of people misusing these technologies in the absence of ways to assess and safeguard against such use cases. As Google Chief Decision Scientist Cassie Kozyrkov says — ChatGPT was a user experience (UX) revolution. Rather than users dealing with AI on the backend (in applications like face unlocking, or movie selection), OpenAI…