During the last decades, there have been several times when technology has been identified as a major threat to education. It happened with the arrival of calculators, during the heyday of Google as well as with the appearance of Wikipedia.
Today, education faces another challenge: knowing how to adapt to new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, which, as some statistics confirm, are here to stay. ESETa leading company in proactive threat detection, analyzes this new modality and how that initial fear could be transformed into another tool to enhance teaching.
A massive impact
Since the release of ChatGPT, there were More than 100 billion people entered to get some type of response from the chatbot. Companies currently use it to answer user queries, write emails, set meetings, to name a few. As it could not be otherwise, the field of education is impacted by this global phenomenon.
Some examples where ChatGPT is used in a disruptive and formative way are the case of teachers who ask their students to generate a text on a topic of their choice with the help of the chatbot, so that they can later find the errors themselves.
But its benefits could go even further, such as being used to address topics in a more interactive way, generating debates and counterpoints, organizing personalized study plans according to the needs of each person, and even its application to save time in administrative tasks.
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, according to its acronym in English), is a non-profit organization that mainly encourages the use of technology in teaching. This is confirmed by the words of its own General Director, Richard Culatta: “If ChatGPT killed evaluations? They were probably already dead, and have been in zombie mode for a long time. What ChatGPT did was bring that to our attention. Our question now must be what we have to do so that young people are prepared for a future that is not so far away.”
Internet, with a greater impact
Along the same lines, the director of excellence in teaching and learning at the University of Baltimore also expressed herself, Jessica Stansbury: “People panicked and that’s why we had the wrong conversations, instead of thinking: Okay, this is already here, how can we use it? Information that was previously delivered in classrooms is now available everywhere: first on the Internet, then in chatbots. “What educators need to do now is show their students not only how to find it, but also what information to trust and what not, and how to tell the difference.”
On the other side of the aisle, there are those who still see Artificial Intelligence as a direct shortcut to cheating, which distances students from learning. A test recently carried out in the United States supports this trend, since it showed that ChatGPT would be able to pass university exams in Law and Business careers.
Blocking its use
This is how, for example, Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in that country, pioneered directly block access to the OpenAI website from the network of all its schools. Washington, New York, Seattle, Virginia and Alabama, among others, also joined. The initiative transcended borders, as universities in France and India also banned the use of the tool.
Interviewed by University of Cambridge, Steve Watson, who serves as co-organizer of the Faculty’s Knowledge, Power and Politics research group, and has explored the meaning and communication of ChatGPT, explained the risk of being too strict with these types of restrictions. “There is no doubt that there is a regulatory problem and we have to be respectful of the need for universities and schools to protect academic and educational integrity. For this reason, some universities have taken the position that it is bad behavior to use ChatGPT to generate content. The problem is that, in our efforts to preserve integrity, we may become insensitive to the change that is occurring as technology is adopted on a large scale,” the expert analyzed.
And how are we doing regarding security?
For his part, Camilo Gutiérrez Amaya, Head of the ESET Latin America Research Laboratory, comments that, “beyond the debate on the impact that the use of Artificial Intelligence can generate as another tool in education, there is an issue that is unavoidable. : that of security. In fact, there are several countries in which ChatGPT is not available in line with regulatory laws linked to the Internet.”
Italy was the pioneer in the West in banning it, due to concerns and questions regarding privacy and data use; and promised to investigate whether or not it complied with the General Data Protection Regulation. In March of this year a bug in an open source library exposed the question history of other users, as well as payment information of ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
“At the same time, like any widely used tool, ChatGPT is also a very attractive target for malicious actors, whether for use it for criminal purposes, such as impersonating your identity and deceiving unsuspecting people. This trend will probably continue and it will not attract attention that cases continue to be seen where attempts are made to exploit vulnerabilities or carry out fraud in their name,” adds Gutiérrez Amaya.
“As with technological advances in general, It all depends on the intention or objective with which they are used.. Perhaps it is still premature to measure the impact of Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT in the field of education. Whether it becomes your best ally or your worst enemy, as always, is in our hands,” concludes the ESET specialist.
An educational initiative
ESET invites you to learn about its initiative Digiparentsand his note “ChatGPT: a revolution for education?” to continue analyzing the potential impact of ChatGPT on education and how this technology could transform the way students learn and engage with educational materials.