AI in Education - An Intro!

What exactly is AI? How about ChatGPT? What are their implications on online education?

Hi friends, welcome back to or to my blog where I talk about my thoughts and learnings on online education (and occasionally on other things :D)

Recently, the world of content that I consume has been constantly feeding me AI-related topics. AI does this. AI does that.

Here are some of my favorites from the past week!

• I Seduced My Wife Using A.I… But She Had No Idea - This is a video made by Gabriel Conte, one of the Youtubers I used to watch at 18, where he pulled a prank on his wife Jess by gifting her AI-generated love letter, poem, and song on Valentine’s day. Spoiler: she bought it 🤡 Relationships are really in trouble with AI 👀

• Love in the Time of Replika - This is a post from the newsletter “Not Boring” where Packy McCormick explores different angles of human relationships and AI’s influence on them.

• i read every book recommended by ChatGPT AI - This is a video made by Jack Edwards, whom I had a chance to meet in Taipei, where he asked ChatGPT to recommend books for him to read. I also did a similar thing a few months ago, asking ChatGPT to recommend me books on Taiwanese history. I find it so intriguing how the model was trained to learn how to give out these books’ names as most of mine were not mainstream at all. You should give it a try :D

• How I Built This with OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman - This is a podcast where Guy Raz interviews OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman on his journey leading to OpenAI and the future of language models. Here is my favorite quote from the episode:

  Some people will use tech for good and bad, but that means we need to work as hard as we can to have the tech as useful for good as possible and as difficult for evil as possible.

• Generate an essay on X in the style of Paul Graham - This is an AI essay generator that can write an essay on a topic of your choice in the style of Paul Graham. AI can learn niche style ✅

And honestly, it’s quite scary for me! These technologies are becoming so smart that they make me question my existence in this world as an undergraduate and about to be kicked out of school.

Worries and fear aside, let’s first learn what this technology is!

1. What is AI?

AI or Artificial Intelligence is a branch of computer science that is concerned with building machines that can think and act like humans, mimicking our cognitive actions. These actions include learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and perception.

As time progresses, we have seen that machines are becoming smarter and catching up to abilities we often thought of as uniquely ‘human’. AI is capable of understanding the environment or context, understanding the problems, and acting intelligently according to the situation.

And most people are not ready for it!

We have only begun to realize “oh this is not just sci-fi that I thought only exists in movies”. AI was once in the realm of science fiction. But over the last few years, advances in machine learning and deep neural networks have moved us closer to a reality where computers can learn and solve problems, just like humans.

Below is an illustration made by Tim Urban in his “The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence” blog series. This series was written in 2015 and 8 years later, the road to Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), defined by Nick Bostrom as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills” is nearly here ??

In short, you can think of AI as a process where humans teach machines or computers how to do things that normally require human intelligence - such as recognizing images, understanding speech, responding to instructions, or making decisions. We repeatedly feed data to train these machines to identify patterns and reproduce similar or new ones.

How can I learn more about AI?

I recommend this blog series by Tim Urban on Waitbutwhy where he breaks down what AI is and where AI is heading. As always, I find Tim’s blog a great starting point to learn about a complex topic.

I have also started reading the DeepLearning.AI newsletter by Andrew Ng covering news on AI.

2. What is ChatGPT?

Over the past few months, the rise of ChatGPT has stirred heated conversations in the education space. Is it a threat to the way we are learning?

Let’s first learn about this technology!

This is the definition of ChatGPT on OpenAI’s website.¹

We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

ChatGPT is an AI technology that can understand human speech and generate very coherent, human-sounding content. The technology has been trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.

Like this!

But is it accurate?

In the episode on How I Built This, Sam Altman, cofounder of OpenAI, shares that the big problem with the current version of language models is that we haven’t yet trained them to clarify what they are saying is accurate.

Yep, you heard it. Accuracy is very very low. But what even is accurate information? Who says it’s accurate?

ChatGPT is an AI technology that can understand human speech and generate very human-sounding, detailed content.

I will further discuss the application of ChatGPT in education in the third section below.

How can I learn more about ChatGPT?

A good starting point is OpenAI’s blog about ChatGPT. They break down methods of how they train AI trainers, limitations, and iterations of ChatGPT.

Paul Graham also recommended a technical paper on what ChatGPT is doing and why it works. It’s a very technical paper for me to understand but if you can digest it, I would love to learn what you get from it.

3. AI in Education

On to the juicy part!

When ChatGPT came out a few months ago, I was over the top happy that now it can help me summarize hundreds of pages of research papers that I don’t need to read :D Saved me so much time on pre-class work!

However, as I looked more and more into ChatGPT, I realized that this technology is just having conversations with me!!

There are reasons why OpenAI is describing ChatGPT with keywords such as “conversational” or “dialogue format”. Some of the research papers ChatGPT recommends do not exist. Sometimes it summarizes papers in a way that sounds very legit but these words don’t match with what the authors of the papers say. ChatGPT’s answers sound legit, but we still need to have our stance on what to do about that information. As Sam Altman explains, OpenAI is still testing and seeking feedback from users to update and improve ChatGPT constantly.

What does this mean for learners?

Technological tools are soooo exciting. They are smart, fascinating and they help us save time with learning:) But when interacting with tools, we need to be careful not to become passive users or consumers. Up until Sam Altman’s podcast, I was blindly following what ChatGPT was telling me and putting it in my pre-class work (though I still do with classes that I don’t like spending time learning XD). But I have also learned that with such a model still in progress, I need to be selective and critical of what ChatGPT is suggesting.

ChatGPT can give us the most accurate answer in the future, but is it relevant to your own context and situation? Computers and machines are catching up with humans’ cognitive ability which means that we need to, more and ever, learn how to learn for ourselves. AI models and technology in general can help enhance our intelligence and make better decisions for ourselves. The point is not to depend on it but leverage it.

Change your mindset from “How can I use ChatGPT to cheat on all my preclass work and assignments?” to “How can I leverage ChatGPT to learn better?”

Some people will use technology for good and some people will use it for bad, you have to decide this for yourself.

Computers and machines are catching up with humans’ cognitive ability which means that we need to, more and ever, learn how to learn for ourselves. Change your mindset from “How can I use ChatGPT to cheat on all my preclass work and assignments?” to “How can I leverage ChatGPT to learn better?” Some people will use technology for good and some people will use it for bad, you have to decide this for yourself.

What does this mean for educators?

The field of AI in education is exciting more than ever. There is technology to help with grading, checking for plagiarism, personalizing learning, visualizing topics, etc. Some of the most promising applications of AI in education are:

1. Learning Analytics: As machine learning and deep neural networks continue to advance, we will be able to train data to build models that can track students’ progress, identify students’ behaviors such as ones who are struggling or ones who are advancing, and understand nuanced factors that lead to an effective and satisfying learning journey.

2. Personalized Learning Paths: Tying to the point above, if we can have high-quality data, we can build learning paths or journeys that are tailored to each student’s needs and wants. Given the diversity of learner types, personalized learning paths will help ensure more students can get to the learning goals that they want.

3. Automated Essay Grading: Machine learning algorithms can be used to automatically score essays and written assignments, based on pre-determined criteria such as grammar, organization, and coherence. This can save teachers time and help learners who are struggling with writing.

4. Personal Tutoring: Similar to viewing ChatGPT as a personal chatbot in learning, technology such as ChatGPT can help each student have a friend/thought partner/tutor alongside to ask questions, seek advice or ideas, and clarify confusion during the learning process. This will be interesting in thinking about scalability and quality in education.

5. Learning tools: The way we learn is not just through text but also through audio and visual elements. AI-generated tools can help us visualize concepts in new ways, communicate information in more ways (besides writing), and help better facilitate the process of information.

Educators should work together to discuss how to best help their learners leverage new technology to learn better and understand the pros and cons of digital tools in learning instead of banning them.

Resources I use to learn about AI in Education

• The Learning Science Newsletter, Powered by DOMS™️

• Transcend Newsletter

• Edtech Insiders

Have more to recommend me? Please leave a comment below!

We are not replaced yet by AI. But AI is becoming smarter faster than we might imagine …

Cheers!

1. The original release of ChatGPT was based on GPT-3.5. A version based on GPT-4, the newest OpenAI model, was released on March 14, 2023, and is available for paid subscribers on a limited basis.