Teachers, Lay Down Your Arms Against AI

In my previous student life, the creation of research papers, both individually and in groups, went through several stages. Initially, we would head to the library—surely enough to make more than a few of us shudder—hoping to find among the bulky volumes some useful paragraph that we could copy by hand. A bit later, some of us privileged ones were lucky to have CDs labeled as "Encarta" (a popular digital encyclopedia from the late 90s and early 2000s). If the topic wasn't too complicated, they saved us a trip as the computer itself could do the searching. Otherwise, the dynamic was the same: locate the paragraph and copy it by hand. In the last stage, we already had access to the Internet. And with it, the biggest nightmare for teachers who assigned homework: Wikipedia. Of course, our teachers managed to convince us that most of the information it contained was probably false. Because there: "Anyone could write." Interestingly, for the first time, we were pushed to try a different approach. We knew the teachers would check the Wikipedia article, so it could be our source of information, but we had to slightly change the way we expressed the same thing; we could no longer copy a paragraph verbatim. Well, at least until El Rincón del Vago came along. It seemed that the only tool available to prevent copy/pasting was to have us do the work by hand instead of letting us use the computer. "That way, they thought, we'd at least read the information once," they would think. How beautiful and neat a printed work looked! And how wonderful were the covers made with WordArt, the then-popular text-styling feature of Microsoft Word. The fact is that we were never taught to extract and manipulate information, or at least I don't remember learning that in those stages. It was quite amusing to see our classmates' textbooks, highlighted with 'the most important bits'—which was nearly everything except for the determiners, prepositions, and a few adverbs.I often find myself wondering: What would have happened if Wikipedia had been valued as a resource instead of being marked as a natural enemy of teaching? What if we had been assigned to analyze an article, its sources, and make a critical comment on its veracity? What if they had chosen a topic with scant information to be completed with references from other places, collaboratively and under supervision? I don't know, maybe today Spanish would not be in the 8th position of articles, being the fourth most spoken language in the world. Undoubtedly, a missed opportunity.

And here we are, in 2023, about to trip over the same stone again, as is human nature. Starting with the concern about detecting assignments and essays made with Artificial Intelligence. I have even read that teachers have been copying and pasting content from student assignments into ChatGPT to directly ask if it has been used to write them. Please, don't bother with that—it simply doesn't work that way. The very company that created ChatGPT made a detection tool available and had to pull it from use as it failed to function properly. There is another company whose business model is based on detecting texts generated by large language models. It uses multiple different approaches at once to give a result and boasts of being "the solution with the fewest false positives." As teachers, we must be absolutely certain and have solid proof when accusing students of plagiarism. So, it's prudent to assume henceforth that texts, images, videos, and other digital content can be created with Artificial Intelligence. That we cannot nor will we be able to detect it with the level of precision we need. We must therefore respond appropriately.When I say we should act accordingly, it does not mean using it as an excuse to stop thinking of new learning or assessment methods and take the easy way out. For example, this teacher mentions that he has shifted from assigning projects done with books to reverting to traditional exams on those books, also stating that he does not believe that memorization makes sense. Clearly, trying a middle ground of conducting an exam where they could have those books available for consultation would seem illogical to anyone, it would not occur to anyone with common sense. I'm not one to tell anyone how to do their job. If he finds it useful for his students to memorize the books, I have no objections. But don't claim that Artificial Intelligence has left you with no other option, and moreover, you think it's a solution that harms the teaching-learning process of your subject. Fortunately, there are other examples that give us hope, inviting us to reflect on how we can turn an enemy into our best ally.

It will be enlightening to see, in this era we might call post-ChatGPT, what new ideas teachers around the world will bring to the table. In the meantime, while we continue to explore other options, we can do something that's already been invented. Something that those who teach mathematics know very well: evaluate the process, not just the result. Because if someone can use a calculator to solve a problem that we want them to know how to solve manually, we simply have to require them to explicitly show the steps they followed to reach the solution. And this can be done in many ways, tailoring the approach to the students' needs, educational stage, and available resources. From telling them to search for the information at home (or in teams located in the classroom) to write the assignment during class hours, to more technological solutions, like using an online word processor that allows reviewing the history of the steps followed until the final work is completed. It would also be beneficial to place considerable emphasis on a journal that students are required to maintain. This seems particularly useful for providing feedback and thus enabling them to enhance their workflow.And why shouldn’t these new technologies be part of that workflow? This is particularly true in the later stages of education, where it is assumed that students have learned to write and express themselves correctly. Let's not forget that afterwards, they enter the working world—a world dominated by the almighty pound, where money is exchanged for time. Therefore, a world where any tool that saves time will eventually prevail. In the first phase of this revolution we are starting, Artificial Intelligence will not take your job, but a person who knows how to use it to be more productive will.

Obviously, to teach the possibilities and limitations that this technology currently has, teachers need to upskill themselves. On the Internet, we can find enough free resources for this with just a little initiative. Included is a guide offered by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Besides reading a lot about the topic, we must also apply it practically. We often complain, rightly so, about the number of hours (well above our contract) that we need to dedicate to our work to do it well: planning sessions, corrections, adapting materials to the diversity of our classroom, meetings, project management, tutoring... Perhaps someone might ask, 'Isn’t it cheating to use AI for grading?' And probably that same person has at some point proposed a multiple-choice quiz that’s automatically marked in the virtual learning environment. It's not about delegating any task completely to Artificial Intelligence, but about using it as an assistant that allows us to do 80% of the management work in 20% of the time. Always in a supervised manner and contributing our experience in the process. Perhaps this technology is the first step towards an evolution of teaching. One in which personalized learning is possible while we improve our work-life balance. Wouldn’t that be a remarkable achievement?

Thank you for reading and making it this far.

P.S.: No AIs were harmed in the writing of this article... though one did slave over the accompanying image.