Teachers, lay down your arms against AI

In my previous life as a student, the preparation of monographic works, both individual and group, went through various phases. In the first, we would go to the library (I'm sure that word makes many people's skin crawl) hoping to locate among the voluminous tomes some useful paragraph that we could manually copy. A little later, some lucky sods had access to CDs labeled "Encarta". If the subject wasn't too tricky, they saved us a trip and the computer itself would do the search. Otherwise, the routine was the same: locate the paragraph and copy it by hand. In the last phase, we already had access to the Internet. And with it, the bane of teachers who set homework: Wikipedia. Of course, they managed to convince us that most of the information it contained was probably false. Because there: "Any Tom, Dick or Harry could write". It's curious, because for the first time, we were sort of forced to do things differently. We knew teachers would suss out the Wikipedia article, so it could be our source of information, but we had to slightly change the way of expressing the same thing; we could no longer copy a paragraph verbatim. Well, at least until El Rincón del Vago arrived. It seemed that the only tool available to avoid copy/paste was to have us do the work by hand instead of letting us use the computer. "This way we make sure they read the information at least once," they might have thought. How smart and tidy a printed work looked! And how wonderful were the covers made with WordArt. The fact is that we were never taught how to sift through and handle information, or at least I don't remember learning it during those stages. It was quite funny to see classmates' textbooks, highlighted with "the most important": Everything, except for determiners, prepositions, and some adverbs.I keep wondering: What would have happened if Wikipedia had been valued as a resource instead of being branded as a natural enemy of teaching? What if we had been assigned to analyse an article, its sources, and make a critical comment on its veracity as coursework? What if a topic with little information had been chosen to complete it with references from other places, in a collaborative and supervised manner? I don't know, perhaps today Spanish wouldn't be ranked 8th for number of articles, whilst being the fourth most spoken language in the world. Without a doubt, a missed opportunity.

And here we are in 2023, about to trip, as good humans do, on the same stone again. Starting with the concern about detecting essays created with Artificial Intelligence. I've even read that teachers have been copying and pasting content from students' work into ChatGPT to directly ask if it was used to write it. For goodness' sake, don't do that, because it doesn't work that way. The company that created ChatGPT itself released a detection tool and was forced to withdraw it, because they couldn't make it work properly. There's another company whose business model is based on detecting texts written with large language models. It uses multiple different approaches simultaneously to give a result and claims to be "the solution with the fewest false positives." As teachers, we're well aware that if we want to accuse students of plagiarism, we not only have to be 100% sure, but we also need proof of it. So the best thing, in my opinion, is to assume from here on out that texts, images, videos, and other digital content can be created with Artificial Intelligence. That we can't and won't be able to detect it with the level of precision we need. Based on that premise, let's act accordingly.When I say we should act accordingly, it does not mean we should use it as an excuse to stop thinking of new learning or assessment methods and take the easy way out. For example, this teacher indicates that he has gone from assigning work done with books to going back to setting a traditional exam about those books. He also asserts that he doesn't think this memorisation makes sense. Because, of course, trying the middle ground of giving an exam where they can have those books at hand for consultation would be something completely illogical; it wouldn't cross the mind of anyone with an ounce of sense. I'm not one to tell anyone how to do their job. If he found it useful for his students to memorise books, that's fine by me. But don't give me that rubbish about Artificial Intelligence leaving you with only one option, and to top it off, you think it's a solution that harms the teaching-learning process of your subject. Fortunately, there are other examples that give us cause for hope, that invite us to reflect on how we can turn an enemy into our best ally.

It will be interesting to see, in this era we can call post-ChatGPT, what new ideas teachers around the world come up with. Meanwhile, if we can't think of anything better, we can fall back on something that's already been thought of. Something that people who teach mathematics know very well: assess the process rather than the result. Because if someone can use a calculator to solve a calculation that we want them to know how to do manually, we need only ask them to show the steps they've followed to reach the solution. And we can do that in many ways, depending on the students, the stage, and the resources. From telling them to research at home (or on computers in the classroom) to write the work during class hours, to more technological solutions, like using an online word processor that allows reviewing the history of steps taken to reach the final work. It will also be interesting to allocate a significant portion of the marks to a log that students have to maintain. Something that I find very useful to give them feedback and thus enable them to refine their approach.Here's the improved translation:

And why couldn't these new technologies be part of that workflow? Again, depending on the stage we're at and how we use it, it can be very useful. Especially in the upper forms. In those where it's presumed that students have learned to write and express themselves correctly. Because let's not forget that they later enter the working world. A world where money talks. A world where money is exchanged for time. Therefore, a world where any tool that saves time will end up becoming widespread. Because in the first phase of this revolution we're beginning, Artificial Intelligence won't 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 must undergo training. On the Internet, we can find enough free resources for this with a little curiosity. Including a guide offered by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Apart from reading extensively about the subject, it's also necessary that we put it into practice. We often complain, justifiably, about the number of hours (well above our contract) that we need to dedicate to our work to do it well: session planning, corrections, adapting materials to the diversity of our classroom, meetings, project management, tutoring... Someone might think: "Don't you think it's cheating to use AI for marking?" And probably that same person has at some point proposed a multiple-choice exam that is automatically marked in the virtual classroom. It's not about completely delegating any task to Artificial Intelligence, but 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 to the process. Perhaps this technology is the first step to provoke an evolution in teaching. One in which personalised learning will be possible while we improve our work-life harmony. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Cheers! Thank you for reading and getting this far.

PS: No AI was mistreated in the writing of this article... But it was used to generate the image that illustrates it.