The artificial intelligence platform, ChatGPT, has, since its recent launch, been all over the news, mostly in sensational fashion. I have come across parents who worry that their children will be able to get away with their homework without any true understanding or knowledge of their subjects. I have also had occasion to meet senior school teachers and even university professors who are worried about their relevance in the days ahead. Some of the issues and concerns of educators and professors do have a certain degree of relevance. Like all new ideas and technologies that are not fully understood or grasped by the lay public, however, ChatGPT—and artificial intelligence systems in general—has generated its fair share of sensationalism and faux fears.
So what does ChatGPT offer? To answer this query, I decided to play around a little with the chatbot and perhaps it will be useful to cite my experiences with it before I offer any explanations or insights.
I decided to start by asking simple queries where the semantics could be grasped without need or recourse to any mathematical or technical language or computations. Thus, when I asked if the title of the Father of the Nation for Mahatma Gandhi was a formal title, it answered correctly and in no time with clarity and brevity to boot. When I asked if it could tell me who first used this title for Gandhi, it said there was no clarity, but the title came into vogue after his death.
When I asked if Subhas Chandra Bose was the first to refer to Gandhi as the Father of the Nation, its answers were unhelpful during two attempts. A little while later, when I asked the query again, it stated categorically that Bose was the first to use the title in a radio broadcast in 1944.
In similar fashion, when I asked if Albert Einstein was a mathematician, it stated that he was a physicist, but he had also made contributions to mathematics. This was an incorrect answer, and after asking twice more, it finally gave me a clear and correct answer. I also asked it a couple of elementary college-level questions in mathematics and it gave hopelessly incorrect answers. I then asked it to compose a letter for King Charles, requesting him to return the Kohinoor diamond and it did a marvellous job with that though I would have loved to put in a little more emotion and history into the appeal.
To sum up, ChatGPT represents an enormous advancement in the field of AI and it is going to get better with time. As little as I understand it, it relies on powerful computing, smart algorithms and gigantic sets of organised data. Will it and other AI platforms have a disruptive effect on learning and knowledge generation? Most certainly, and ChatGPT is already entering that realm. Incidentally, there are other AI platforms in more focused and narrow areas that are making powerful advances.
Google has been able to get AI to prove mathematical theorems and we all know that beating a computer at chess is well nigh impossible. Siri and Alexa too are powerful AI-based digital assistants. So yes, educators had better watch out. India’s policy-makers need to wake up to how we in India can take advantage of these developments and also enter this AI race for our own security and well-being.
Dinesh Singh
Former Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University; Adjunct Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston, US
Twitter: @DineshSinghEDU