Most of us are familiar with the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) and may have used it in our workplace or leisure a little or a lot. Technologies like Siri, Alexa and Google are abundantly found in households all around the globe today. These are examples of conversation AI bots. ChatGPT is being heralded as the ‘next big IT evolution’ in regards to conversation AI bots. Some are saying that it is the biggest innovation in schooling since the introduction of the calculator. 

ChatGPT generates convincingly human-sounding text and engages in realistic conversation. It currently generates its responses based on a large language model trained on huge amounts of text from books and the internet. Similar to autocomplete, it predicts the next words in a response based on previous ones using the probability of words appearing after other words that it learned from its training. 

What is ChatGPT capable of doing? 

ChatGPT is capable of completing various writing and research tasks. It has the capacity to serve both industry and education. You can ask ChatGPT to explain quantum physics, write a poem on command, or write an essay on the various techniques used to minimise the spread of infectious disease. This has obvious implications for education. Universities across the world are already engaging with technology which can examine a student’s assignment to see whether it has been generated by human thinking or ChatGPT. 

What are ChatGPT’s limitations? 

According to experts a full AI takeover isn’t exactly imminent. There is a saying that ‘an infinite number of monkeys will eventually give you Shakespeare’, but that is likely not the case with ChatGPT, at least at the moment. While the content ChatGPT produces seems impressive on the surface, the reality is not all responses appear well-worded or are in fact correct. Additionally, it is important to remember that the context ChatGPT produces reflects biases, opinions and views of the humans that informed the text it has been trained on, which may not align with your own values or beliefs. 

This becomes apparent if you ask ChatGPT highly conceptual questions or pose difficult or complex problems to solve. 

Once again this makes the teaching of the ‘soft skills’ or ‘critical skills’ an incredibly important component of education today. Teaching students to think critically, problem-solve and work collaboratively continues to be an important component of contemporary education and this is why we place such importance on this in our teaching and learning at Living Faith. 

Blessing and peace 

- Andrew Kelly, Principal