Let’s start at the beginning (more or less) with Artificial Intelligence in K-12 education. The starting point I will identify will be the launch of ChatGPT, as it is the point of awareness for the majority of the population of our planet, that AI has arrived, and it is here to stay. This is not to say that there have not been components of AI in K-12 education prior to ChatGPT, certainly, there have been. But ChatGPT ‘s launch represents a fundamental change in the way that AI is understood, viewed and mentally represented by the majority of people.
At the end of 2022, OpenAI launched a chatbot, named ChatGPT, that within five days attracted over one million users (Doshi et al., 2023, p. 6; Yu, 2023, p. 01). ChatGPT revolutionised people’s understanding of AI simply by being so very easy to use. The ChatGPT screen appears very similar to a search screen such as that of Google, but the space for the user to type in appears at the bottom of the screen. It also, unlike a search engine, provides some suggestions for the user in terms of interacting with the chatbot.
The layout of ChatGPT is so minimal, that it becomes obvious to new users how they are to proceed in order to interact with the artificial intelligence.
It’s important to know that the free version of ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 as shown at the top of the image), as of the date of this blog post, has been trained on data up to 2021. (The paid version, GPT-4 has been trained to a more recent point; According to the company who created ChatGPT, OpenAI, it has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021. The model has been trained on a diverse range of texts, including books, articles, and websites, allowing it to understand user input, generate responses, and maintain coherent conversations on a wide range of topics (Chan & Hu, 2023, p. 2). When you ash ChatGPT a question, you receive a response that reads as smoothly as if a human had considered your question and took time to craft a response. Without taking a deep dive into the technical details, it is worth noting that the chatbot called ChatGPT was trained using more than 175 billion parameters (Chan & Hu, 2023, p. 2). This massive training is how, despite that it is actually not connected to the Internet (OpenAI, 2023), it is able to construct responses that “feel” human.
References
Chan, C. K. Y., & Hu, W. (2023). Students’ voices on generative AI: Perceptions, benefits, and challenges in higher education. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 20(1), 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-023-00411-8
Doshi, R. H., Bajaj, S. S., & Krumholz, H. M. (2023). ChatGPT: Temptations of Progress. The American Journal of Bioethics, 23(4), 6–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2023.2180110
OpenAI. (2023). What is ChatGPT? https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt
Yu, H. (2023). Reflection on whether Chat GPT should be banned by academia from the perspective of education and teaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1181712. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1181712