ChatGPT is a new AI chatbot that can not only fluently answers questions from online users but also generate realistic, human-like essays. This is why the chatbot is causing a debate in the field of education, with experts, teachers, and students divided about whether it will ruin learning or enhance it.

    Mike Sharples, a professor at the Open University in the UK, had ChatGPT generate a scientific article that he said “could pass a first academic review.” And this is what many teachers are concerned about: AI systems becoming increasingly powerful, and students learning how to use AI in education much faster than older generations can keep up. They see an awful scenario where professors might think that they have taught their students well when they receive error-free assignments but, in fact, it's all down to ChatGPT or a similar tool. Debarka Sengupta, an AI expert, has similar concerns. He worries that academic standards could suffer if students start to depend on the technology. If they stop learning how to write essays themselves and use ChatGPT instead, they could become “extremely incompetent and addicted.”

    However, there are those who see the chatbot as a tool with immense potential like Bernadette Mathew, a PhD student in biology. She has been learning how to write computer programs to help her analyse the huge amount of data that her experiments produce, but learning to code left her struggling to keep up with her research. And this is where she turned to ChatGPT, which helped explain what she doesn't understand about coding, find errors in her own codes, and sometimes even code for her. ChatGPT could also help in other areas. For example, the ideas it generate can prompt students to write the difficult first words or first paragraph of an essay, to give them the confidence they need to start writing more.

    Calculators changed how mathematics were taught. Before calculators, the result was paramount. But, when calculators came, it also became a necessity to show how you had solved the problem. Some experts have suggested that a similar thing could happen with academic essays, where they are no longer only evaluated on what they say but also on how students edit and improve a text generated by an AI. ChatGPT is definitely not going away, and adapting to it will be a challenge for teaching, but there are also opportunities for schools, colleges, and universities to get better at educating.

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