Don’t Ban ChatGPT—Teach Students How To Use It

This new frontier of invention will cause people to be lazy.

They won’t use their own minds anymore—they will rely on the device for everything.

This will be the end of true creativity and originality.

At first blush, the above arguments sound as though they could be taken from any one of the many articles and think pieces published in the past few months about the impact of ChatGPT on current students. However, these arguments come directly from the fifth century B.C.E.—recorded in The Phaedrus, these statements paraphrase Socrates’ objections to the invention of writing.

Fears about the ways that new technologies will reshape society have existed for millennia, and in many ways, those fears have not been unfounded. As scholars have noted, Socrates was correct in his predictions about writing fundamentally changing humans’ memory, and the process of neurological restructuring has only continued with subsequent technologies from computers to Google to ChatGPT.

The question is not whether the technology will have an impact on us as individuals and a society—it is how we will approach and utilize the technology to orient that change in a positive direction.

With the release of ChatGPT, many of the concerns in the education sector have mirrored Socrates’ ancient arguments, and fears of plagiarism have led many school systems to ban the program outright. However, the program is only the beginning of new technological horizons which can be used in a productive and innovative way in the classroom. ChatGPT’s value as an educational tool is proportional to the amount of instruction students receive regarding what the program is, how to use it, and—perhaps most importantly—where its shortcomings lie. If students regard the program as a digital genie in a bottle, equipped to write their papers at the push of a button, they will not only generate incorrect and uncreative work, but will cripple their own writing and critical thinking skills in the process. If, on the other hand, they approach the program as one of many digital tools available to enhance or inform their work, ChatGPT has the potential to significantly aid students in their learning and writing.

One of the most significant advantages of ChatGPT for students is its ability to provide instant answers to a wide range of questions. ChatGPT can provide quick responses, streamlining students’ research and helping them find sources for further information or clarify tricky concepts. Additionally, ChatGPT can help students identify areas where their writing can be improved, whether by offering simple suggestions on paragraph and sentence structure to more complex guidance for improving the coherence and flow of the text. If teachers choose to allow the software, students can make use of these features within the framework that teachers permit—whether they require students to cite ChatGPT, demonstrate and explain exactly how it was used, or show how the program informed their writing through various iterations of their work.

By instructing students of the uses and benefits of the program, teachers and administrators can help students recognize the role of their own critical thinking in the process and approach ChatGPT as a tool in their arsenal rather than a one-stop-shop for completing an assignment. As with any educational tool or resource such as JSTOR or Zotero, educators can provide students with examples of how to effectively use ChatGPT, inputting the most effective questions and interpreting and evaluating the responses they receive. Educators must emphasize that without a strong initial concept, creative approach, research acumen, and grammatical knowledge, a student is at the mercy of the software—and the software is not without (sometimes critical) errors.

For this reason, students also need to be equipped with a deeper understanding of how the program works. ChatGPT is a large language model, which means it generates responses based on the input it has been trained on. While this information is vast and varied, it’s not infallible. When beginning a chat with the program, users are met with disclaimers that say as much: “May occasionally generate incorrect information;” “ May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content;” “Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021.”

The program’s shortcomings can negatively impact a student’s comprehension in significant ways by generating inaccurate or misleading information, or in more innocuous ways, such as suggesting inappropriate or stylistically bland vocabulary or sentence structures, and failing to recognize important nuances in language that are necessary for effective writing. Without understanding that they must critically evaluate all of the program’s output, students run the risk of becoming dependent on the software and hindering their own capabilities as budding researchers, writers, and thinkers.

ChatGPT will undoubtedly alter the way that students learn, whether in the short-term or long-term. However, providing students with a robust education in the program is actually the very antidote to what teachers and commentators fear most—students’ blind reliance on the program. Rather than instituting bans, those in the education sector should seek to demystify ChatGPT and equip students to use it with discretion.