Hi ,
They say the secret to business success is identifying a burning problem people have and selling a solution.
But ideally, that problem shouldn't be something you created to begin with.
After sending the education sector into a spin with the release of ChatGPT, last week OpenAI released a work-in-progress classifier trained to "distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs from a variety of providers."
Here's the thing...
Identifying and minimizing plagiarism is necessary to maintain the integrity of the education system. But it's only half the solution, when it comes to responding to new technologies, such as ChatGPT.
Most students attend school or university to learn, not to cheat. Policing AI-based plagiarism addresses the small minority of students who do cheat, while ignoring the majority who don't.
Students also need to be taught ways by which they can benefit from these technologies in a manner that
doesn't constitute academic misconduct.
Like other AI-based tools, ChatGPT has the potential to augment human intelligence or replace it entirely. But we, as individuals, get to choose whether we are augmented or replaced.
To paraphrase Boris Steipe, creator of The Sentient Syllabus Project, we can either learn to surpass AI, or allow it to become our competitor.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
