The new year has indeed started with a bang and the December holiday already feels like a far distant, blissful memory. With a new year comes new challenges and new technology, especially in the teaching world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is properly taking the world by storm and is changing the landscape of almost every single industry. Tools like MidJourney for example, are completely turning the world of design on its head as anyone who buys the software can create masterpieces by being smart with certain prompts to create a unique image or concept that would otherwise perhaps not be brought to life. When looking at teaching, the debate around whether teaching jobs are safe with the fast and furious development of AI is sure to get heated in the very near future.
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) has been making headlines lately since its launch last November. ChatGPT is a chatbot and brainchild of OpenAI. This chatbot is built on top of OpenAI’s plethora of language models and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. The hype around its detailed responses and articulated answers spread like wildfire. However, there is always panic when unknown, weird and wonderful inventions pop up, but it is worthwhile to research to find out exactly how inventions can benefit daily life, rather than mass hysteria kicking in that jobs are now not secure because of AI.
One of the most important differences between human and AI learning is that an AI instructor isn’t a real human being. Kind of obvious right? But during thousands of years of evolution, humans have learnt to interact with each other in a specific way. Humans empathise and have feelings, whereas a digital instructor, for example, is just a piece of programmed software. There is no real interaction, personal motivation and just that human engagement that is needed in a classroom for example. Imagine a learner has a really tricky question on course material – the teacher can then explore different ways of conveying an understandable answer and cross-referencing different things, while a digital bot might go off in a whole other programmed direction that can cause even more confusion. Learning is not just about consuming information, but understanding the meaning and emotion behind subject matter and how it relates to a specific learner in a specific context. Rest easy dear teacher, you are not replaceable, technology simply enhances our world.
Just as on a light-hearted note: About a week ago, after being sent a song written by ChatGPT in the style of Nick Cave, the songwriter himself responded in The Guardian saying: “The act of writing a song is a blood and guts business, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness. With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bull, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”
AI won’t easily replace teachers. However, a teacher that knows how to expertly use AI as a teaching assistant will replace teachers who don’t.
If you’d like to learn how to use technology like this, speak to our career coach: https://goteach.co.za/product/career-coaching-and-support/
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