What Is ChatGPT, and Why Are Schools Blocking It?
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Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.
That's one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.
The free tool has been around for just five weeks but is already raising tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and a host of professions. Unlike previous " large language models," such as OpenAI's GPT-3, launched in 2020, the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection.
Millions of people have played with it over the past month, using it to write silly poems or to help compose formal emails. "While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success," said New York City Schools spokesperson Jenna Lyle.
OpenAI said in a human-written statement this week that it plans to work with educators as it learns from how people are experimenting with ChatGPT in the real world.
Vocabulary:
Tough - difficult
silly- not serious, childish
term paper - end of semester report
critical thinking -Â related to the objective analysis and evaluation (i.e., without allowing feelings to affect you) of an issue
in order to form a judgment or opinion
churn out - to produce many things quickly
a host of - many
