No, ChatGPT Is Not The End Of High School English. But Here’s The Useful Tool It Offers Teachers.
At Forbes, I take a look at the concern over the hot new chatbot.
The college essay may well be dead; that’s not a bad thing, for reasons we’ll get into. English class (which I taught for 39 years) is not dead; however, some teachers may need to do a bit of soul searching.
ChatGPT does represent a serious step forward and seems to have finally brought algorithmic language composition out of the uncanny valley where it has been stuck for years. But it still has some serious limits.
Language production algorithms are like linguistic weather predictions. Your weather forecast comes from a simple process: check current conditions, search a vast library of previous conditions, answer the question “When conditions have been like this, or sort of like this, in the past, what happened next?”
The growing strength of the GPT family has been an increasingly large library of “conditions” aka pieces of writing accessible on the internet. It is the predictive text of your google search bar times a gazillion. It is a selective mash-up of everything that has ever been fed into it.
That comes with built-in limitations. My culminating assignment for years was a local history built on primary sources. The chatbot has never “read” anything about my small county, so it apologetically “declined” the assignment. I asked it to write an analysis of a report released by a major organization a few days earlier; it declined that assignment, too. “I’m sorry, but I’m not able to browse the internet or access external information,” it says.
Lucas Ropek, reviewing the chatbot for Gizmodo, found that not only does it make mistakes, but it will cover its gaps in knowledge by making things up, sometimes with considerable embellishment. In other words, it has an eerily human capacity for bullshitting its way around gaps in its data base. Ropek’s big insight was that this makes ChatGPT a good fiction generator (check his article for Richard Nixon and the T-Rex).