ChatGPT – Isn’t That Us Thinking Like Robots? Asking For A Friend!

Inquirer columnist Segundo Eclar Serrano says, unequivocally: “ChatGPT: Making Inclusive Education Possible” (21 March 2023, Philippine Daily Inquirer (opinion.inquirer.net). He is agog at how a robot can produce educational materials with just 1 human command request; I teacher, thinking digitally both critically and creatively, am unimpressed.

He writes:

… I have been testing ChatGPT for a week now and I am terribly impressed by its capabilities. I asked the app, “Write me a problem scenario where the people in a poor community adjacent to a nickel mine are divided into those who advocate the mine to be closed for its damage to the environment and those who advocate that it remains for the jobs that it provides. What kind of process might enable them to arrive at a workable community decision?” The app produced a realistic and well-documented scenario and process that could be role-played in a political science, environmental science, or development studies class.

Whatever! That is tantamount to saying, “We don’t need teachers anymore – in the Philippines at US$20/month (yugatech.com), ChatGPT is cheaper than 20 teachers!”

For creative writing, what or how would ChatGPT teach the student? It could not; it would not – it would just think out for the student and write the piéce de assistance. As teacher, ChatGPT will be producing robots with human forms.

As a teacher, I believe in the “multiple intelligences (MI)” theory of Harvard professor Howard Gardner. I will now reinvent MI into what I call “9 Ways of Intelligent Thinking” (9 WITs), and these are:

1.   Bodily-Kinesthetic – “Body-Movement Thinking”
2.   Existential – “Life Thinking”
3.   Interpersonal – “People Thinking”
4.   Intrapersonal – “Self Thinking”
5.   Linguistic-Verbal – “Language Thinking”
6.   Logical-Mathematical – “Number/Reasoning Thinking”
7.   Musical – “Sound Thinking”
8.   Naturalistic – “Nature Thinking”
9.   Spatial – “Picture Thinking”.

Those 9 WITs are 9 ways of initiating thinking towards learning.

Not with ChatGPT. With the Department of Education implementing the “awesome” ChatGPT, how will we teach students how to think themselves!?

Mr Serrano says ChatGPT is one of the Large Language Models (LLMs):

LLMs are designed to be meaningfully predictive purveyors of the world’s accumulated recorded data, thus promising to narrow the gap between “private ignorance” and “public ignorance.” Public ignorance refers to questions the world does not yet have the answers to, despite the efforts of scientists and researchers who keep pushing the envelope of public knowledge.

Is Mr Serrano saying that with ChatGPT, anyone can be knowledgeable at once?

Private ignorance afflicts those who are poorly informed and educated, involuntarily marinated in fake news, propaganda, superstition, and disinformation.

Is Mr Serrano saying ChatGPT provides only verified news, will bypass what it identifies as “propaganda,” will ignore “superstition,” and will identify pieces of “disinformation”?

The world is awash with knowledge, information, and data, but… the educational system is decrepit – not enough teachers, not enough classrooms, not enough learning resource materials, not enough systems to achieve educational goals, and not enough political imagination and political will to enable real and effective problem-solving in education.

Mr Serrano, ChatGPT will think for all humans? I think not!@517