I’ll ask the question again. Is it okay for a ghostwriter to do your kid’s homework? I can hear you shouting the answer back at me right now: “Of course NOT!” Well, the idea that it could be possible, if not acceptable, may not be far in the future. What can artificial intelligence actually do?
I just read an article in the September 2022 issue of Scientific American titled “AI Writes About Itself.” It was fascinating. As an experiment, a doctoral researcher decided to try something off-the-wall. She logged into her OpenAI account and gave the following instruction: Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text.
The article continued, “As it started to generate text, I stood in awe. Here was novel content written in academic language, with references cited in the right places and in relation to the right context.”
First, I had to learn what GPT-3 was. Forbes told me,
There’s been a great deal of hype and excitement in the artificial intelligence (AI) world around a newly developed technology known as GPT-3. Put simply; it’s an AI that is better at creating content that has a language structure – human or machine language – than anything that has come before it.
This researcher, Almira Osmanovic Thunström, was just playing with
an idea. She was asking the artificial intelligence to write about itself! But the possibility of your kids being able to use artificial intelligence to write an assignment for them is most likely in their future. This is not a new problem. When handheld calculators became common back in the 1980s, almost every kid had one. Some schools recommended them as back-to-school purchases. It didn’t take long for the roof to fall in. Kids used the calculators for every math problem they were given. The result? The kids didn’t learn how to do math! Big surprise.
The same principle holds true for the use of artificial intelligence. It will be able to ghostwrite an assignment for a science class, a book report, or a term paper. Is that a good thing? I think not. As an example, I had someone compliment me recently on the number of links I put in these posts to the material I was referencing. I don’t do that just to prove I’m not making things up. My hope is that you readers will click on at least some of them and read the full article or other information for yourself. You will probably learn something you didn’t know anything about before.
Take my post ENDING USE OF FOSSIL FUELS: POSSIBLE? PRACTICAL? – Climate Part 3 as an example. Open a new window on your computer and go to “ENDING USE OF FOSSIL FUELS: POSSIBLE? PRACTICAL? – Climate Part 3.” Now click on one of the links I provide (you can start with the first one referencing an article dated February 14, 2022) and read it. Okay, read a part of it. I’ll be willing to try standing on my head (a feat I’ve never been able to accomplish) if you don’t learn something. The act of doing the research to validate your beliefs or just to expand your knowledge is a great learning tool for both you and your kids.
If your kids use AI to write a report for them, it will find all the proper references to substantiate the premise, but what will Joey or Jane learn? What will drive them to seek more information about something that genuinely interested them? How will they learn to love reading if they never have to read the book behind the report?
And beyond that, how will they know if the AI is accurate or if it has made a mistake if they don’t know the subject matter? The same was true for the calculator—if they didn’t know the math, how could they be sure the answer the calculator gave them was correct? They might have entered a wrong number, and if they didn’t have at least a ballpark idea of what the answer should be, they would have no clue if what they saw was right or wrong.
Students can already do some of this with the capabilities of present-day computers. Be careful. It’s up to you to not let this happen. If you want your children to learn about many things, you have to teach them to want to do it for themselves. Start using the process with them (although they probably know more about how to use the computer than we do) or go to the library and check out books. Show them how learning can be fun.
And always impress upon them that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it.