What is ChatGPT
According to OpenAI “ChatGPT is a language model trained to produce text” (Natalie, 2022, para. 2). Put simply, you ask it a question or provide it with a prompt, it responds with text.
What do I really need to know about ChatGPT
It is NOT Trustworthy
- OpenAI is not transparent about what specific data it pulled from the Internet to build the database of text that ChatGPT uses to generate responses.
- OpenAI admits that “while we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content.”
- Any questions related to events or the world after 2021 “may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content” (Natalie, 2022, para. 4).
- The ChatGPT responses do not include any citations or references to credible sources.
It is NOT Safe
According to the Privacy Policy:
- ChatGPT is not to be used by children under 13 years old.
- ChatGPT is collecting a massive amount of information from its users - including when and how users interact with the tool, users’ IP address, browser type, time zone, type of device, operating system, and country.
- ChatGPT does not abide by any “Do Not Track” signals.
- ChatGPT may share your information with third-party vendors, law enforcement, affiliates, and other users.
OpenAI does not recommend sharing any sensitive information when asking ChatGPT questions because any user inputted text cannot be deleted from the system (Natalie, 2022).
Rethinking Assessments in the age of ChatGPT
If you’re worried about students using ChatGPT to do their homework for them:
- Assign homework that can’t be googled or replicated by AI.
- Consider multimodal assignments instead (e.g., create a TikTok-style video to teach your family about how to balance a chemical equation; design a stop motion animation about the most influential event in a book; use Google Maps to identify three buildings in the form of different types of geometric shapes).
- Engage students in a critical interrogation of how ChatGPT responds to writing prompts.
- Rather than asking students to respond to a prompt for homework, ask ChatGPT to write a response to that prompt*. Copy the text response from ChatGPT into a Google Doc. Have students critically annotate the text using the commenting feature in the Google Document (e.g., What information is presented? What is missing? Why do you think that ___ is missing from this text? How reliable, accurate, and credible is the text? How did you determine this? What biases are present in the text? Why? Who is the intended audience? How do you know this?).
- Ask students to conduct an Internet search to see if they can find the original sources of data that ChatGPT used to draft the response.
- Ask students to revise the text response to include credible, evidence-based sources.
NOTE: Due to the privacy concerns, I would not recommend asking students to use ChatGPT to generate their own text to annotate. Instead, provide them with a copy of ChatGPT responses to use.