“We need to be asking what we need to do to prepare young people-learners-for a future world that’s not that far in the future,” says Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), a nonprofit that advocates for the use of technology in teaching. Banning them is futile, possibly even counterproductive. And they will only get better at standing in for a student on deadline-more accurate and harder to detect. What’s certain is that essay-writing chatbots are here to stay. It is far too soon to say what the lasting impact of ChatGPT will be-it hasn’t even been around for a full semester. Many are too overworked, under-resourced, and beholden to strict performance metrics to take advantage of any opportunities that chatbots may present. This is an important conversation to have so that they are aware of the potential benefits and misuse of AI, and so they understand how they might apply it to their classrooms.”īut it will take time and resources for educators to innovate in this way. “We are engaging with educators across the country to inform them of ChatGPT’s capabilities. “We believe that educational policy experts should decide what works best for their districts and schools when it comes to the use of new technology,” says Niko Felix, a spokesperson for OpenAI. The company says it also consulted educators when it developed a free tool to spot text written by a chatbot (though its accuracy is limited). And OpenAI has worked with educators to put together a fact sheet about ChatGPT’s potential impact in schools.

Far from being just a dream machine for cheaters, many teachers now believe, ChatGPT could actually help make education better.Īdvanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more.Įducational-tech companies including Duolingo and Quizlet, which makes digital flash cards and practice assessments used by half of all high school students in the US, have already integrated OpenAI’s chatbot into their apps.

I spoke to a number of teachers and other educators who are now reevaluating what chatbots like ChatGPT mean for how we teach our kids.

But three months on, the outlook is a lot less bleak.

That does not affect me