Teachers' despair over the new artificial intelligence

New AI technology makes it frighteningly easy for Norwegian students to cheat at school.

A chatbot is a computer program that aims to communicate with you. But chat, which Open Ai released last week, can do much more. Much more.

The computer program uses artificial intelligence to do everything from coding an entire application to analyzing Henrik Ibsen’s poems. The text produced cannot be found anywhere else.

This is the big discussion in the rooms of Norwegian teachers during the day. On Monday this week, the cup went missing when the National Association for Norwegian Education sent a troubling message to politicians in the Norwegian parliament.

«On behalf of the Norwegian subject (along with others), I would like to raise a major concern. Teachers, both in Norwegian and elsewhere, are attesting that students are increasingly using openly available AI in their written work».

The letter continues:

«I am very concerned about evolution and believe that in the long run it threatens the writing and reading skills of the population, democracy and the development of new ideas and knowledge. We have to insist that the pupils acquire good reading and writing skills, which I hope the country’s politicians will agree with.»

Grade depreciation

Morten Irgens is a project manager for technical research and development work at Kristiania University College, as well as participating in several large international collaborative projects in the field of artificial intelligence (ClaireAnd the NuraAnd the Adra)

He’s been working with AI since the late 1980s, and shares teachers’ concerns about cheating in schools.

He actually takes it even further:

– Clearly, this technology can undermine the integrity of all types of education. Ergens says it’s a devaluation of your degree.

Irgens has spent some time getting to know ChatGPT. It would probably be more accurate to say that he had been talking to her for a while.

– This chat show got me thinking of a quote from Arthur C Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”. My old grandfather thought this was magic.

Lazy, stupid and easy to exploit

Another person who has spent the past few days sitting and talking to the new AI is Eric Fassenden. He is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Bergen.

– He says it has the power to make pupils, students, and researchers lazy, stupid, and easy to exploit.

– Do you think you would be able to expose the cheat if someone used it to write themselves Norwegian assignments?

– I think it requires us to create appropriate tasks to expose such cheating. On a good day, an AI can write a fairly decent summary of a popular novel, or a good paragraph about a historical event. Therefore, we should avoid tasks that require passive aggregation of information.

ChatGPT is really just a very advanced language model, so the blocks of text it produces are based on an intelligent “guess” that you want the letters to be in a certain order.

Ask him a few follow-up questions and you’ll quickly see that he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s like talking to a very articulate parrot.

– First of all, to deceive oneself into believing that knowledge is information, and that it is perfectly fine to gather only ready-made material. It is very naive to think that finding, organizing, and compiling notes and pieces of information has no value in and of itself. This is what it means to recognize a phenomenon!

Fight or flight?

The question for educators is: Should we fight new technology or facilitate it? Fassenden believes organization is essential.

– This is not about either of them or, I think. It’s important to find good ways to live with the technology we’ve created – then regulations are essential. Exploring possibilities and testing limits is also in order, Fassenden says.

Ki expert Morten Ergens realizes that teachers are struggling with the new tool.

– There are a lot of people who would tear their hair out, but I wouldn’t. As with all technology, we are adapting. More emphasis on oral participation in class, oral exams, participation in group work, and showing that you can do things personally. maybe the students use Chatbots and other advanced tools In the same way as a man used the library.

The teachers union is not positive.

– As for solutions, I currently see two. The first is to allow students to write by hand on a much larger scale, which is not a good solution for obvious reasons. The second is to provide technology and resources that prevent the use of said AI tools. Perhaps future curricula should include guidance on how to teach pupils the sensible use of technology in their writing work, but they should also learn the craft of writing!

NRK has been unable to contact Open Ai, who is behind the technology.