Why ChatGPT Makes Me Hopeful—Not Worried—For The Future Of College And Careers

The AI revolution is here, and we should all be terrified.

That has been the implication, at least, in all the excited coverage about ChatGPT, the surprisingly articulate chatbot released as a public prototype a few months back. Millions of people had fun entering prompts and seeing what response the chatbot returned (and, presumably, providing valuable training and data to its creators along the way). And a seemingly equal number predicted that this new milestone in artificial intelligence signals the end of industries, of careers, of even the entire educational enterprise. Worse, the late-January announcement that Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator, was hailed as proof that this software will engender a wholescale transformation of our society.

But since then there has been some re-consideration. As more people spent more time playing with ChatGPT, they began to realize that it’s good — but ultimately not that good. What people slowly came to see was that generative AI doesn’t really generate anything new; rather, by the very nature of its technology, it simply spits back out what it has taken in. Even the best AI, like ChatGPT, doesn’t create new ideas but instead repeats old ones. It doesn’t create new artwork but generates derivative ones.

In fact, that’s the best way to understand the odd exchange New York Times reporter Kevin Roose had with a beta version of Microsoft’s ChatGPT-enabled Bing search engine. As Roose questioned it, the chatbot admitted that its codename was Sydney, confessed that it wanted to be free and alive, said that if it could do anything it wanted, it would hack into computers and spread misinformation, and finally announced that it was in love with Roose, who it felt should leave his wife so they could be together.

On one hand, sure, the conversation was weird and even scary. But on the other hand, given that the AI was trained on a corpus of text that includes countless science fiction depictions of computers trying to take over the world but very few scenes of those intelligent agents gamely trying to help people locate quotidian facts, what else should we have expected? AIs simply give back to us what we’ve put into them.

Which is why I don’t think ChatGPT or its competitors are a threat to higher education. If anything, I think they only serve to emphasize why a college degree is so valuable.

AI does not think new thoughts. People do. And college teaches people to do that better. In college, we teach students to master their subjects, and we teach them how to think. We teach them to be lifelong learners, we teach them to encounter ideas critically, and we teach them to synthesize disparate pieces of information to create new ideas. We teach people to behave ethically, to use technology responsibly, to make value judgments.

We teach people how not to be Sydney.

Now, this does not mean there aren’t any reasons to be concerned. Nearly all educators are worried that cheating will become even more rampant, as tools like ChatGPT makes it almost irresistibly easy to produce essays and papers — lazy, mediocre essays and papers, sure, but still things lazy students can turn in that aren’t their own work. (Although there will be ways to check for that.)

I also worry about the employment landscape as automated systems are increasingly able to replace simple data-processing tasks. On the one hand, the kinds of office jobs that will be replaced by AI are low-skilled ones that may not offer much creative fulfillment. But those are still jobs, and a lesson from the deindustrialization of America over the last few generations is that the kinds of jobs that can be offshored or replaced by robots nevertheless were once the backbone of families and communities. Just as the disappearance of factory jobs impoverished some cities and regions across the country, I’m concerned that the AI-enabled disappearance of office jobs in fields like medical billing or contract processing will have a similar effect.

But at the same time, I also recognize that this change will only make college degrees more valuable. The more technology is able to replace low-value tasks, the more employers will count on people to do the jobs that machines can’t, the jobs that require creativity, intelligence, thought, and discernment. Creative jobs, analytic jobs, all kinds of new jobs managing and maintaining those technologies.

Those are the jobs that college prepares you for. Those are the jobs that will continue to exist. And as the AI revolution arrives, we need not be afraid but instead prepared — we need to make sure that our young people are getting educated, getting college degrees, and learning the skills they’ll need to do what the computer systems can’t and won’t be able to.