Dear Students,
A current hot topic is ChatGPT and other new AI tools. Last week, I led a discussion with faculty about how these tools will impact education at UT. As you can imagine, professors expressed a lot of concern about how the tools can be used for cheating and to otherwise short-circuit the learning process. But I also heard a lot of excitement about how AI tools can be used to make courses more challenging, interesting and effective. There's a free virtual event this Wednesday where you can learn more about coexisting with AI in educational spaces.
The technologies are evolving quickly, and we're still not sure how they will transform those spaces. But I'd like to share with you a few key points for you to keep in mind as you explore this new AI frontier:
- Get clarity: Some instructors may encourage you to use AI tools in your coursework, while others may prohibit their use. Before you use these tools, get clear on your instructor's expectations and ground rules.
- Be aware of the biases and inaccuracies in text produced by ChatGPT and other language models. The other day I asked ChatGPT a few questions about my area of expertise in neuroscience. The responses had an authoritative, scholarly tone that sounded like something I might write. But there were major factual and conceptual errors and made-up citations.
- Understand the limits: While language models like ChatGPT are good at summarizing basic information and producing grammatical sentences, they are really bad at some of the things that we value most in science, like creativity, reasoning and ethical decision-making.
I liked what I read in one summary of the potential hazards and promises of AI in education:
As software that can simulate human thinking, [generative AI like ChatGPT] may indeed create some thoughtless students who rely on it too heavily. But it might also create students who are ready to think twice, to push beyond statistically likely ways of thinking. This sort of student, ready to demand more than AI can provide, will be precisely what an age of generative AI requires: people who understand the difference between human and machine intelligence, and who therefore won't mistake its glibbest outputs for the horizon of all human thought.
My hope is we—students and faculty alike—will use AI to focus our education away from things that AIs can already do quite well, like regurgitation of facts, and toward the more exciting and uniquely human aspects of science and math.
Best,
Dr. Drew
P.S. This message was written completely by me, Dr. Drew, but here's a joke from ChatGPT (cringe): "How many machine learning experts does it take to change a light bulb? None, they just train the neural network to learn how to do it."
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