Education
Without doubt, students (and not just students) will draw on ChatGPT frequently and for many purposes. That’s fine—no point in outlawing it. The problem arises when work ostensibly done by the student (or even by a group of students) has actually been accomplished simply by giving directions to ChatGPT.
We know that in the United States cheating by students is rampant and, as documented by Wendy Fischman and me (link), most individuals at the college level don’t even see cheating as a significant problem—at least compared to other challenges on campus, such as mental health or interpersonal conflict. But unless we drop any notion of accountability from our educational system, we need to define situations and assessments where students need to submit their own work and not work simply executed by ChatGPT.
The obvious solutions: test students in environments where they are not allowed to use any electronics (or where electronics are disempowered); have only oral, face-to-face testing; or make students sign sworn pledges/statements, with automatic severe consequences if they do not honor that commitment. Educators could also acknowledge that students will be tempted to use ChatGPT and include its use as part of curated assignments.
The better solution: Create environments where cheating is seen as wrong and not tolerated and where assignments or projects are carried out in co-constructive ways. Two helpful examples:
US colleges like Haverford which have a long and storied history of student honesty;
US colleges like Olin College of Engineering where much of the work is group cooperative work, and any effort to undermine that joint work is identified and ostracized.
Wendy Fischman and colleagues on our research team are currently investigating how colleges and universities can prioritize ethics.
There has also been handwringing over whether students will lose the ability to compose their own writing, similar to the fears that students would lose the ability to do math when hand-held calculators became available. Educators will have to decide which competences truly matter and which ones can be allowed to disappear. With respect to cursive handwriting, there are clearly alternative perspectives; on the other hand, I doubt that any responsible educator would endorse illiteracy, ill-numeracy, or agraphia.
Cognitive Psychology/Cognitive Science
I refer here to the amalgam of scholarly disciplines (launched in the middle of the 20th century) that seek to understand cognition, particularly those forms of cognition exhibited by adults or children in the course of development. Initially focused on the developing individual (e.g., Jean Piaget) or the functioning adult (e.g., Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman), the field also explores animal cognition, and/or human-computer interface.
For hundreds of years, novelists, science fiction authors, and creators in other media, have sought to clarify the nature of cognition that is not exclusive to humans—and particular creatures from outer space or ones created by engineers (e.g., the machines or organisms envisioned by René Descartes, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Lady Lovelace, or Goethe’s Faust).
