I sometimes have a hard time understanding the reticence to adopt tools like this. It seems hard to fully predict all the good and bad consequences so I’m more of a let’s try it and see person. Though adapting to the good and bad usually takes longer than it should.
As a luddite (and teacher) my immediate reaction is “absolutely not” but looking back at my own high school experience, the valuable exercise wasn’t the initial brain dump but the refining. That said, chatGPT can write at a higher level than most high schoolers so I’m not sure there is much to refine.
Ultimately what I get stuck on is that creating stuff is hard and we need to practice doing hard things because its good for our brains. Sure, a forklift can pick up a barbell but that’s not why someone goes to the gym.
I guess. I still have trouble seeing the issue. Isn’t it nice to not have to think about some of the details as much. If there’s a tool that will do it and you can use it professionally, why not practice the thinking skills of writing with help from chatGPT. What advantages are there to practice without mechanical help?
That’s a fair point. But my counter would be shouldn’t we practice using the tool we will use most of the time. If I have a choice I’m going to use chatGPT in many cases.
Ideally the hard things that we practice are applicable to real life, but I know in education it’s hard for that to always be the case
I don’t know… I probably had some teacher somewhere along the way ask me what I would do I were stuck on a desert island without a calculator?
Seriously though… I think the issue with some of these is that people can tune it out and just believe things that are outright wrong. Using it to enhance your writing is all fine and good but what happens when it makes up facts and figures?
An analogy that I’ve read and really liked:
Why does the football team lift weights? There isn’t a play in the book that requires they pick up a dumbbell in the middle of the field.
Well they lift weights to make their muscles stronger, which benefits them when playing.
Doing hard math or writing an essay is the lifting weights. Most kids will never use calculus, but learning advanced math builds their problem solving and logical thinking skills. Writing and revising their own words teaches them how to craft a message and more importantly, critically think about what message they are sending. Word choice matters everywhere, not just an essay.
Is FRC the place to lift weights? Maybe. For many kids, its one of the few places where they’re motivated to actually put in real effort.
Yeah, I agree. There’s still value in being able write.
I think the calculator analogy is a good one. I don’t generally agree with teachers when they don’t allow calculators, but I know that there seems to be a correlation between those who are more comfortable not using a calculator and students who are more fluid and adaptable when solving math problems.
The fear I have is going too far in the direction of not allowing a calculator and not allowing students to develop the skill of using the calculator in the first place.
Im in two ways about this, I feel like AI is a valuable tool to enhance the writing and improve on it. On the other hand there are aspects of the process that are missed when it is used to accomplish challenging tasks.
A lot of my concerns have been addressed already but i’ll add mine particularly for Dean’s list and WFA. To me, both of these awards are a way of giving thanks to an outstanding mentor or student. There is a level of sentiment that I feel should come from writing it yourself versus using a tool to generate it.
Of course I had to watch one of those videos about the invention of the barbell this week, and how people really didn’t build muscle with dumbbells like they could with the barbell. So the question is, is ChatGPT a barbell? Maybe we can build muscles faster if we use it to the right advantage.
Stretching the analogy of it further, I don’t think weight lifting was an option until in 6th or 7th grade, that at some point it is better to do different exercises. So are high school students ready to train with ChatGPT? Or should that be something for later when they’ve had more practice without and are not ready yet to become heavy mental lifters.
If everyone who learns to write without using chatGPT writes as well as you I’m on board.
I wonder if we’re not down playing the weightlifting that writing with chatGPT requires. As Marshal(l) mentioned, there are issues like inserting incorrect facts, and chatGPT doesn’t know exactly what you want to say. You still have to formulate what you’d like to say and work to refine your writing.
The issues of when students should start practicing which skills is also very interesting. Again my default is, let’s try it and modify our approach as we learn more.
For instance, I asked it about your spelling of “Marshall” with only one L:
Those who opt for “Marshal” with a single ‘L’ are dubbed “lizard people,” known for their efficiency in spelling and their uncanny ability to blend into the typo-prone underbrush of the internet. Legend has it that they have a special affinity for sunbathing on warm rocks and hissing at autocorrect suggestions. But fear not, for they’re harmless, scale-free jesters of linguistic mischief!
Should teams use ChatGPT or other LLMs to write the whole award paper (almost) entirely by itself? No
Is it acceptable to use ChatGPT to help refine or expand your ideas, or to help edit your paper? I think so.
In my opinion LLMs are most effective when they work with a human to accomplish a task. I believe that teaching students how to use LMMs effectively, without completely relying on them for everything, is a good thing. I understand the concerns, I share many of them but I believe that, if used correctly, LLMs can be a powerful tool (including in education).
This was my main take as well. I fall in the camp of “use some ChatGPT for working on/refining impact essays, scripts, etc. Don’t use it at all for WF or DL essays, as it’s disrespectful and besides the point”. I would much rather have a “worse essay” written by my students showing how they really felt than a “better essay” that’s been strained through layers of AI. I personally won’t touch ChatGPT when writing DL essays at least.
My two cents as a college student who uses ChatGPT mostly for entertainment purposes:
ChatGPT is not going to give you anything resembling a decent, factually correct essay. I’ve gotten it to believe that 1 = 3, 4, and 7 at the same time. It wasn’t hard.
I’ve never used ChatGPT to write an essay for me. However, I have asked it for ideas on how to get started, or how I should phrase certain things. It’s really good at putting together sentences. It’s not good at getting them to not contradict each other.
If you’re going to use it for awards, I’d ask ChatGPT for ideas how to phrase certain things, or how I should get started. It’s not going to know your team well enough to win an award. Your team is the only one capable of doing that, so you will have to write the award submission yourself if you want to win. You can’t get around that. But ChatGPT can be a great help for ideas or getting started.
And don’t use it for anything personal, it’s really bad at conveying any emotion at all.
I think there are a lot more cons to using ChatGPT, first it wouldn’t be able to write something like a human would. If i pulled a paragraph from out impact essay I would be veryyy surprised if Chat GPT wrote it. Mostly because the way we wrote our paper was very much tended to human emotion, and it wasn’t the most formal essay. What I’m trying to say is if Chat GPT were to write an essay it wouldn’t be able to get the human aspect to the essay. Second is structure, I haven’t used Chat GPT a lot so I could be wrong, but there are reasons that put certain paragraphs here and there. The big thing that Chat GPT is bad at is creativity, it makes a unique essay, but it did that by looking through thousands of other essay’s. Personally I don’t think that Chat GPT will be an effective use for FIRST essays for the next few years.