ChatGPT is two levels above Slovak education. An expert explains why children should learn to use it

In the past, the internet and smartphones were a breakthrough invention for schools – instead of memorizing information, it brought the need to sort and navigate through it. Today, a similar revolution is being brought about by generative artificial intelligence, i.e. tools like ChatGPT.

Let’s show it on the example of the task that the students will be given: Write a paper about who was the first to discover that the Earth is round, and how did he find out? In the past, children had to look it up in the library, later it was enough for them to look for the answer on the Internet on the school computer. A few years later, they could find it in a few seconds in a cell phone under the bench. Well, today, all they have to do is write a question in ChatGPT, which spits out a finished paper.

How will this tool change education? According to researcher Marek Urban, it is important that children learn how to use ChatGPT at school so that they can use it effectively and not be fooled by it.

Marek Urban from the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic worked on research on how students use ChatGPT.

Before the interview, you recommended me to watch a movie First contact (Arrival). It’s about a linguist trying to find a common language that aliens and humans can understand. Why is this film relevant to the topic of artificial intelligence in education?

Try to imagine a school classroom full of children. You are a student, you are learning the subject, but you struggle with it, it is difficult and you do not understand it. You have two options. Either you will continue to fight with it alone, or you will ask for help from a classmate who understands it. But if you choose the second option and ask for help, there may be a catch.

What kind?

Social relations. Maybe it’s a classmate with whom you don’t really make friends, he’s gifted or he’s not popular with the kids. It often happens that, due to various social influences, you prefer not to ask for help, even if you need it. ChatGPT suddenly comes into play. All social inhibitions fall away with him. He is the best classmate you can ask anything you need. But it is only a tool with which you need to learn to communicate.

As a linguist who was looking for a common language for humans and aliens?

Yes, because ChatGPT is a social agent. It’s not Excel, where you type in numbers and formulas and it spits out spreadsheets. This is the agent you need to talk to and learn how to talk to in order to get the help you need. He’s a classmate you talk to without the risk of it being weird or awkward.

You also sent me video, which shows what it’s like to work with virtual reality glasses on. A person wearing VR glasses may be sitting at a desk at home, but they can change their surroundings to a sunny meadow or even the surface of the moon. Thanks to the glasses, he turns the small screen of the laptop in front of him into a large computer. How relevant is it in this topic?

We have a variety of emerging technologies, each still in its infancy, but promising huge advances in education. So far, these different technologies are not interconnected. When that happens, it will be a huge revolution. Imagine that suddenly ChatGPT gets a face and a voice, and together you discover, for example, gravity on the moon or work together to solve any problem.

So, for example, could children have VR glasses in the classroom and it would seem to them that they are all learning together in a meadow?

For example, that too, but I had in mind more of a revolution in how we will work, communicate with each other or create new things in general. I recently spent half a year in the US on an educational project – they are creating a game to help children develop scientific thinking. In the game, children solve mysteries and at the same time improve their reading of scientific texts. It is a demanding job, a large team of graphic artists animates the characters, actors dub them. I told them: It’s great that you’re doing it, but why so complicated? After all, generative artificial intelligence creates a voice for you and you don’t need actors. You don’t need laborious animation because AI will do it (artificial intelligence, translated as artificial intelligence – editor’s note).

What did they tell you?

Of course I pissed off a lot of people. The majority objected to me that human work cannot be replaced. But there were about two or three who said they would try to work on it with the help of artificial intelligence. The future is in these two people. Because people who will use AI will be much more efficient in their work, faster, will do more things in the same time.

How groundbreaking is ChatGPT among innovations, especially for children and schools?

Let’s illustrate this with Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives from 2001. It provides a list of six verbs to help teachers define learning objectives. At the very bottom is memorization – it is the standard of Slovak education. You learn facts, dates of famous battles or memorize poems. Next comes understanding. You don’t want the kids to just remember it, but to