Whatever the truth of ChatGPT's capabilities, it's definitely gone mainstream. Articles fromĀ The Age,Ā The Guardian,Ā The Times, andĀ The AtlanticĀ have popped up like mushrooms across the internet. I've obviously got a bias to those about education, includingĀ Will ChatGPT Kill The College Essay?Ā andĀ AI bot ChatGPT stuns academics with essay-writing skills and usability.
A focus of articles like these has been the threats to education - particularly tertiary - and the potential for cheating. This will certainly be of huge importance. The education system is a slow mover, and the chances of it catching up with the pace of change are slim to none.
At the most optimistic end of the scale, we can see the essay losing its position on the pedestal as the primary form of knowledge assessment. Writing still has a place, but it sits alongside discourse and debate.
AI writing becomes integrated into education and sits alongside other tools to support learning.
In order for this to happen, teachers and educators need to get to grips with the capabilities of the technology. After spending a week working with ChatGPT, and a few months with earlier models, we've learned a lot about getting the most out of the AI writer.
The best way to learn how to work with ChatGPT is to get in there and experiment. It can help, however, to use a few basic principles to guide your writing:
be specific; chunk the work; and get it to improve on its own output.
Prompting GPT is "a lot more like teaching than it is like conventional programming."