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Seattle Public Schools Bans ChatGPT; District ‘Requires Original Thought and Work From Students’

posted by hubie on Thursday January 19, @08:45PM   
from the let-us-know-how-that-works-out dept.

mrpg writes:

https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-public-schools-bans-chatgpt-district-requires-original-thought-and-work-from-students/

Seattle Public Schools is joining a growing number of school districts banning ChatGPT, the natural language chatbot from OpenAI that has sparked widespread attention in recent weeks.

ChatGPT has garnered praise for its ability to quickly answer complex queries and instantly produce content.

But it's also generating concern among educators worried that students will use the technology to do their homework.

SPS blocked ChatGPT on all school devices in December, said Tim Robinson, a spokesman for Seattle Public Schools, in an email to GeekWire.

"Like all school districts, Seattle Public Schools does not allow cheating and requires original thought and work from students," he said.

The district also blocks other "cheating tools," Robinson said.

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Original Submission

• Re:Public schools and original thought Re:Public schools and original thought (Score: 4, Insightful) by fliptop on Thursday January 19, @10:31PM (1 child)

  by fliptop (1666) on Thursday January 19, @10:31PM (#1287636) Journal

  those skills will no longer have value in a human resource to an employer

  Perhaps the tables will turn and the ChatGPT robot will become the teacher.

  --
  To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• "MBAs with twice our salaries and half our IQs" (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday January 21, @11:41AM

  by canopic jug (3949) on Saturday January 21, @11:41AM (#1287875) Journal

  Perhaps the tables will turn and the ChatGPT robot will become the teacher.

  The tables have already turned. The administrators hire the teachers and researchers instead of the other way around. Now the administrators run the institutions like businesses: into the ground and then beg for bailouts. In order to do that, they turn to "austerity" and cut budgets and staffing to the bone in the misguided hope, or flat out lie, that performance will improve if only they cut enough. And the fastest way to cut corners is with teaching staff:

  But as the cost falls, and as people become increasingly unable to distinguish plausible-sounding nonsense from genuine wisdom, human suppliers will compete with machines in a race to the bottom. And the disastrous consequences will not be limited to academics’ bank balances. As a systems theorist, I predict that this market for lemons, as economists call it, will run into the same problem that devastated banana production in the late 20th century: production of sterile monocultures. Positive feedback loops of mediocrity will kill off intellectual progress by failing to reproduce innovative experts with core disciplinary skills. At best, we will be stuck in an endless recycling of “approved facts”. At worst, our ability to reason and assess knowledge claims will collapse, leave us sitting ducks for recruitment and brainwashing by malign forces.

  In fact, you could argue that we are nearly there already. Credential inflation means that a degree is now considered a necessity, and many students are not so much thirsty for knowledge as anxious about being left behind in the red queen’s race to grow their CVs. Profit-hungry universities’ response to this market has, at the extreme, reduced professors to poorly paid operators of degree machines that chunk educational material at the optimal grade for retention by passive student-consumers. Such a model is ripe for automation and sublimation by LLMs, whose training data can be washed of anything too marginal.

  -- AI will replace academics unless our teaching challenges students again [timeshighereducation.com]

  Universities and colleges have a lot of remedial work to restore former capacity as knowledgeable authorities in various fields. Continuing to give passing grades to students merely for showing up, all in the name of turning a profit for the department or the institution, is not part of that.

  --
  Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.

  Parent