An intro to ChatGPT style apps for the busy teacher

For those of us who were hiding from student loans in a cave in India don’t read the tech news and are not particularly interested in tech, we here at GNU SLE plan to bring you up to speed on the wide and wonderfully annoying world of chatbots like ChatGPT.

First of all, you need to know what a chatbot is. In layman’s terms, it is a program that uses language models and keyword searches to answer a question or request from the user. Remember Clippy, the assist bot on Word? It wasn’t very useful and went away 20 years ago. For good or ill, chatbots are here to stay. You’ve likely experienced talking to bots at some point, if you have ever contacted a company’s customer service through their website. Recently, a newer iteration of bot has captured everyone’s attention. 

The newest version of chatbot came from the OpenAI development team. Quite simply, OpenAI uses a supercomputer from Microsoft to process large amounts of natural language datasets for its AI assistants. This gives its chatbot products a lot of computing power to answer questions posed to it through analysis of keywords and sentence structure in the results taken from online sources. Other chatbots use similar sources of data and analysis methods. 

ChatGPT from OpenAI has received the bulk of attention lately, but it isn’t the only player in the industry nor is it the oldest. ELIZA and PARRY, two programs released in the 60s and 70s focused around psychology and repeated responses. As hardware and operating systems improved, the assist bots became more elaborate and responsive. Nowadays, you find these bots in IoT devices like Alexa and Nugu, and in your phones like Google Assistant and Siri.

The newest versions of AI assist bots like ChatGPT are special because they can do things far beyond their original purpose. For example, users have made entire novels produced by ChatGPT. Other companies plan to use ChatGPT-patterned assistants in their websites and apps to help guide their customers’ purchases. The next time you go to a travel website like Expedia, the conversation you have with their staff might start with their chatbot. This AI-assistant has evolved from a research assistant and web curiosity to the confines of our classrooms.

A lot of ink has recently been poured about the use of chatbot apps like ChatGPT, particularly when it comes to homework. Students have been caught using the app to write essays for them, forgetting about the obvious weaknesses in the apps’ writing ability, such as plagiarizing content. There are ways to use AI assistants in the classroom. Socratic by Google is an education-focused assistant app designed to answer student questions and help with homework. Unlike ChatGPT, it won’t produce an essay, but it can help with worksheets with its scanning capabilities. Over at Eduweek, Susan Barker suggests using ChatGPT to make individualized quizzes for students to check their understanding of a reading assignment. Elizabeth Matheny suggests using the app to make outlines for a particular prompt, thus assisting students with lower-level reading comprehension.

Now that I have explained the assistant app revolution, I have some questions for you.

1. Has the news about ChatGPT inspired you to use AI assist apps in your class?

2. Has the chatbot “revolution” made you worry about your job?

3. Do you have concerns about the app’s tendency to plagiarize when generating papers?

Feel free to answer in our comments file at the bottom of this page.

Sources:

19 Ways to Use ChatGPT in Your Classroom (Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI 

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it | MIT Technology Review

The Fascinating History of ChatGPT | Medium