By Ron Baker
I tried it! “ChatGPT” that is.
Within various social circles this has been a recent conversation piece. In the last two months or so this digital product has undermined some groups raison d’etre (fancy French word that means “reason for being”).
Let’s take the academic community for one example.
What is ChatGPT? An example of Artificial Intelligence on steroids!
What is Artificial Intelligence? What if you could think at super speed and were able to have accessible resources stored in your brain and instantly accessible? We often talk of IQ – intelligence quotient – that is often interpreted as an ability to synthesize known knowledge quickly. Now, I know there is a lot more to IQ than that (the nuances are as many as there are researchers who seek to understand IQ).
But, for our society generally, IQ helps us label the scale between genius and imbecility (a term we seldom use nowadays). In a computer age we are confronted with a new scale for IQ. If IQ is merely speed, capacity, information retention and synthesizing then we will never be able to keep up with a computer.
Thus the term “artificial intelligence”. Think of the extreme of homo sapien intelligence (the greatest genius we humans have ever seen) – anything beyond this intelligence becomes “artificial” intelligence.
If education is merely learning or being “intelligent”, then ChatGPT has replaced our need for education. This computer learning system (called a chat bot) pulls from available global resources to provide for us the intelligence of the world. Think of this. What if someone/something else could gather all the information together, then put that information into a logical format and finally spit the results out in easily understandable language – have we destroyed the basis of our educational system? Professors who are wanting to limit the use of ChatGPT are figuring that students are not having to learn anymore – thus negating their reason (job) for being.
Or is education something beyond this? ChatGPT can push the boundaries of the programmers intent – becoming the construction worker. But ChatGPT can never be the original architect – only the extension of the expressed thoughts of the original architect.
What if our education emphasized creativity as well as information and logic?
We vary from the machines in this aspect. Let me propose a radical thought. Instead of a totally evolutionary element to our current state of being, what if an original creator instantly set forth our parameters for life (including thinking and intelligence)? What if that creator chose to put a boundary on those parameters that seems ridiculous? While not allowing for the created to be the creator, what if the capacity was given to the created to be like the original creator – to be in the image of the creator?
ChatGPT only generates “chat” as far as their human creator has programmed them. The computer does not have the mind of the creator, only the extension of that mind exhibited in the programming that was done. Whereas, a human has been granted the mind of the original creator and thus creativity is explosive, expansive and constantly evolving.
Of course, the big question is accessing that creativity for good. How do we humans do that? That is a story that starts at the beginning, is stifled, then rescued, and now is readily available (although not always taken advantage of).
But I’ve run out of column length!
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