By: Lara do Rosario

Plato lamented the invention of the alphabet, anxious that the use of text would threaten traditional, memory-based, spoken language. He claimed this novel technology would cause “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” What would Plato say if he saw ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence program capable of rivaling the most experienced professionals at top companies?
Winsor states that its mission is to “prepare young women to pursue their aspirations and contribute to the world,” but is their decision to ban AI, a tool that will for certain be a fixture in any industry they go into, really preparing Winsor students to contribute to their fields?
Should the use of generative AI be banned in educational settings, or should it be fully embraced? As a learning tool, AI can be used to bridge the gaps in our educational system. It can be used to supplement what’s taught in class and offer students a personalized AI tutor when teachers are unavailable. It can assist teachers in doing tedious tasks, like automated grading and correcting homework, freeing up time for more meaningful planning. 

Our modern perception of AI is heavily centered on ChatGPT, which was created in November of 2022 by OpenAI to generate humanlike text models. Since then, it has developed into the leading large language model based platform, capable of receiving both text and image prompts. Down the line, as AI systems get more advanced, they could even be capable of giving feedback on student work, maximizing what students get out of each assignment. Ultimately, generative AI programs like ChatGPT can have meaningful uses in creating personalized learning content. For instance, there are only so many publicly available “dimensional analysis practice problems” when you Google it for your chemistry test. AI can use past learning markers to create personalized practice sets and therefore promotes independent learning and healthy use of a tool for intelligent purposes. Benedictine University AI Professor Todd Kelsey suggests that teachers and students learn from ChatGPT’s “self-optimization” algorithms by studying how the AI improves its own responses. One of the ways he proposes this strategy can be done is, “as part of the learning process, try asking ChatGPT to improve writing and explain how it improved the writing.” Students can learn valuable information about the AI’s process of self-critique and about evaluating their own writing from this system.
It’s going to take a lot of work and effort to completely rewrite and re-hardwire our brains to adapt to this new system of education. In all sincerity, I love school, and it pains me to think that instead of sharpening their skills by writing essays about Silver Sparrow or straining to factor a polynomial expression, future students might simply ask an AI chatbot to do it for them. But as hard as it is to accept, AI is here to stay and is a reality for students going out into an AI-powered world.
ChatGPT has become taboo in educational spaces. To most, “ChatGPT” is nearly synonymous with “entire essay written by AI.” According to CTO and ChatGPT expert Alex Velinov, the arrival of ChatGPT has prompted us to trash the system of take-home essays and instead opt for evaluations that are less prone to AI cheating while still allowing students to use AI as a tool where it is enriching. For future assignments, he proposes that “students can use all the tools in the world to prepare and then present, communicate, and stand up for the ideas they are presenting, all of this with a more real-life focus.” By allowing students to independently use these tools for research and preparation, they learn to collaborate with the AI while also keeping a balance between work themselves and done by technology.
AI is not static; it grows, learns, and increases in its capability to help people. I doubt that AI will truly “replace” jobs that it is already better at, but rather we will see it used primarily as an aid in many professions, one that can only perform as well as the best humans in that profession if we are skilled enough to know how to use it.  AI and its benefits as a tool provide institutions like Winsor the opportunity to become leaders in the race to understand AI by teaching students how to use it properly. The future for institutions wanting to evolve their curriculum alongside AI development should include STEM classes on interacting with and evaluating AI, large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and more on how we can use AI ethically and responsibly.