Every year, we have a slogan competition at my uni. It’s for a movie festival.
A year ago, I wrote seven beautiful drafts (god knows how many hours I spent) and submitted one. No luck.
But this year, I decided to use the ChatGPT magic.
So, I asked it: “Write a cool slogan for a short movie festival with the theme “A day in the life.”
And voila. Like a pandora’s box. An answer appeared: “One day, a million possibilities.”
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Cool! I submitted it and stopped thinking about it.
A few days later… I saw an Instagram post from the club announcing the winner.
“Winning Slogan: By Barun Prakash Sharma”.
Yesss! Your boy won. (Cheated? You decide.)
From 200 submissions, by the way.
So, as I basked in the glory of becoming a better slogan writer than 100s of others, I wondered:
“Is creativity dead?”
So in today’s edition of the Status Code, we will take a peek into how AI can affect the future of education.
And no it’s not just the ChatGPT nerds. Many tools are now using AI to make their offering better.
Whether you are a teacher, student, or a 60-year-old doing a Masters (not that age matters), you use AI daily.
Editing a document in Word? Bada-bing! GPT-3 for grammar checking.
Using Grammarly? It’s powered by a large language model too.
So, let's get straight to the business…
Students and Teachers
Give students tools to do their homework, and they will use all sorts of things.
But that’s not it. AI can also be an excellent tool for students to brainstorm topics and ideas in class.
Tools like Grammarly make students more productive
Grammarly has almost solved the world’s grammar problems. Writers like me no longer need to be great at grammar. I can use Grammarly.
And, students have been using it too. To write their term papers. For their college essays and more.
That’s why VCs love it. It passes the reverse validation formula (for any product idea, imagine a future with it. Now, think about it. Can you go back to the world without it?).
Grammarly raised its last round with a valuation of $13 billion. That makes the company the 10th most valuable US startup. Not a bad feat for a typing assistant.
The problem of plagiarism
ChatGPT hallucinates, sure (it frames an answer as if it’s true, but it’s a farce).
Yet, ChatGPT is sober enough that teachers and universities are acting like fish out of the water. That’s why they are going on a banning spree. Which brings us to an opportunity. A new kind of anti-plagiarism software.
The Status man, isn’t there enough of those already?
Yeah. But the old ones don’t work. Because they knew you were cheating when they could find the same text on the internet.
But, ChatGPT and other generative AI models create new fresh content, hot out of the oven. They don’t copy and paste.
So, the hot topic on Twitter is anti-GPT tools. There’s a popular one made by a college student - GPTZero. The founder says 30,000 schools have signed up for its waiting list.
Schools are so desperate - they will sign up for an empty form if you promise them a solution to this problem.
Also, OpenAI itself announced a new tool to detect ChatGPT-generated text. I tried it out. And, let me put it this way - it’s far from perfect.
Parents
Then there are parents. Understanding a parent's need is simple. They want the best environment for their children (small ones, studies say they have already given up on the big ones).
So, there is a booming adaptive learning niche. They promise to help kids get a personal learning experience.
Do you think you know your kid?
Think again. These tools will crush your assumptions.
They work by giving children specific assignments and assessments. Then, with enough data, they study the kid and identify their weakness.
Knewton, an app like that, generates lesson plans for your child. And you didn’t even know your child was bad at Maths!
Is there proof these tools work? Well, some work, for sure. Studies show the benefits. Personalized plans can help make kids smarter and more intelligent.
But like anything else, parents should accept any tool with a grain of salt. It’s like what my doctor says. Smoothies can be good for you. But if you’re adding whipped cream and ice cream, it’s not what it should be.
Policies
The world can't stop talking about ChatGPT, and its role in education. How students can use it to cheat, and whatnot. It's like they are in a spell.
But don’t worry.
The Status Man has two principles in life: Never do wrong unto others, and always show both sides of the story.
So, let's dissect the situation.
The main focus of the criticisms is how teachers can no longer confirm who wrote something. But that’s beyond the point.
Is education limited to “content mastery”? No.
A child’s future depends on other factors, like their social network.
That’s where we can shift our focus. We can use AI to solve the age-old problem of educational inequality.
How? Policymakers say integrating different demographics is an effective solution.
But it’s easier said than done. For that, we can start with how we rate our schools.
Right now, we don't rate schools based on how they help individual students. We rate them based on what the neighborhood looks like (demographics) and the test scores.
So, what happens when we give good scores to schools in affluent, white neighborhoods? More rich, white people buy properties there. Nobody wants their children to go to bad schools. So, that's how self-segregation happens.
The only way forward is to change how we optimize our score. We need to find a rating process that evaluates schools based on how they improve a student's life. Not on vanity metrics like neighborhood and test scores.
The good news? Rating platforms like GreatSchools.org have started using AI to do so.
And why is it important? Because parents can open themselves to selecting schools in different areas. So they can go "outside the bubble". And we may have more integrated schools in the future.
To sum it up, AI can change how we do things upside-down. And you know, people don’t like uncertainty.
But the world is always moving forward. So we will have to adapt to the new ways. That’s why the Status Man says:
Embrace the change. Embrace the change.
Are you embracing the change? Let me know how you are.
Until then,
See you later!
Btw,
One of our subscribers sent this list of ChatGPT failures! Check it out!
So, Will AI revolutionize the education sector for good?
Yes, positive
No, look what ChatGPT has done, AI is dangerous
