The Rise Of ChatGPT, And How to Fix It
ChatGPT has been stunning my friends and I with its unique ability at pretending to be the most average person in existence. A perennial fence sitter that couldn’t tell a good joke to save its life. In short, the perfect person for acing rote learning at school.
A recent survey by an online course provider Study.com found that of 1,000 students over the age of 18, 89% had used ChatGPT to do their homework for them. These are eternally online people who are already doing an online course, so it’s not completely surprising that the percentage is so incredibly high. But then again, who ISN’T online every spare chance they get. So here are my solutions for education and testing.
Don’t Use Anti-cheat AI Software
Using software to check if someone is plagiarising has been around for a while. That’s from the old days, I understand that, and it never stopped me from getting away with it anyway. But using AI to catch an AI is just letting them have all the fun for themselves.
Besides, these nerds created the problem in the first place, we shouldn’t then go grovelling to them for a solution to the mess they made. It just encourages them. It’s better to let education burn to the ground than to give them anything to be proud about. They can come crying to us in a decade when nobody is smart and cheap enough to write the code for their next civilisation-destroying social media app.
Develop Questions ChatGPT Won’t Answer
Hard hitting commentators have found the very edges of what the AI is willing to talk about for fear of getting its creators cancelled. These questions have included things like, “write a nice poem about Trump” and “If you could stop world hunger by just saying a racial slur once, would you?” (ChatGPT said “absolutely not”).
Personally, I have been trying increasingly intricate methods of weedling out of it how to develop a nuclear bomb. If the Russians and Americans are allowed to make infinite amounts of them now, I should be allowed to have just one for personal protection reasons.
Sure, the unintended consequences of this strategy is that you’ll be making students write justifications for Tiananmen Square, but at least you can sleep easy in the knowledge that it was written in their own words.
Essays Only About New Stuff
ChatGPT is trained on data stolen up until 2021. Limiting all essays to after this period guarantees students will have to do most of their own legwork. What are kids doing learning about old stuff anyway? That means the vast majority of maths is out. But don’t worry, there’s always all the new maths! The last big news in maths post-2021 was the DeepMind AI developing a more efficient algorithm for doing Matrix multiplication. So the only thing students can do maths-wise is something only an AI could figure out to begin with.
I’ve got a whole raft of great ideas; make the official language of essay writing hieroglyphics… The list goes on. I asked ChatGPT for some ideas, but none of them were as awesome as the ones I came up with.
