Editorial

From the Assistant Principal

Fear not ChatGPT

You won’t believe this one trick the media uses to make you angry!

One of the big talking points in education at the start of the year has been the uprising of ChatGPT, raising attention to increasing developments in artificial intelligence.

As usual, certain media publications have used this as a platform for fearmongering. Of course they did, because this is how they make money. We’ve known about the effectiveness of outrage clickbait for years.

And this is not a new phenomenon, nor is it uniquely neoliberal. Christians have used apocalyptic language to falsely predict the Second Coming of Christ for millennia, despite Jesus himself saying we won’t know when it will happen (Matt 24:43). But people believed it because it was scary.

And people are believing the same thing about artificial intelligence and education:‘The sky is falling. Skynet is coming.’

‘Education will never be the same.’

Well, that’s actually true. Education will never be the same after artificial intelligence truly takes hold, just as it wasn’t the same after the integration of other disruptive technologies:

There are many more. After each technology was developed came the predicted fear response, but we didn’t stay in that state, and the sky hasn’t fallen yet.

Will it have a net positive effect? That question has both a complex and easy answer.

The complex answer is we don’t know.

Predicting the future based on the past is highly unreliable. What we do know is that human beings have been created with the remarkable capacity to overcome challenges, and we have already won the battle against our only true enemy (Romans 8:37).

The simple answer is that it will have a positive effect, if we are wise. The industry has already responded, our favourite educational neuroscientist has already made a YouTube video analysis of it, and learning communities are already finding myriad ways to use it to improve education (just ask one of our resident innovators, Mr James Kearney, who saw the potential as soon as it came out).

Don’t let the media industries exploit your fear. God wasn’t surprised by this, and Christ has already shown us the divine response to angry, fearful human movements.

Note: I was tempted to use ChatGPT to write this article, but I fear this would be too cliché at this point.

Daniel Symons

Assistant Principal, Learning and Teaching