“Everything must be like something, so what is this like?”

― E.M. Forster

Artificial intelligences are likely to transform our lives and societies in unimagined ways, but right now many educators face the immediate problem of how to respond appropriately to students’ use of ChatGPT, which can produce passable text and images in multiple genres and formats. What are we to make of this new resource and its place in education?  Is ChatGPT a threat to academic integrity or a tool that teachers and their students can leverage to achieve better performance? 

Responding to something we don’t know or understand is daunting, but we can employ one of the principles of adult learning to help us: we can get a grasp of something new by relating it to something we already know. What kinds of innovations and challenges have we or our predecessors faced before that can help us make sense of the new AI? How you respond to the challenge of ChatGPT may be related to the internal metaphor you are using to think about it. 

Think for a minute. How is ChatGPT like: 

• A performance-enhancing drug?
• A calculator?
• An elevator?
• A multivitamin?
• A personal assistant?
• A robotic exoskeleton?

ChatGPT in terms of a performance-enhancing drug
It boosts performance, making you stronger and more competitive. Everyone else is using it too, but it is considered cheating. We can detect its use with sophisticated tools. To keep things fair, we should allow it for everyone or ban it for everyone. If we want to know how someone can ‘really’ perform, we should forbid it. 

ChatGPT in terms of a calculator
Students at the early stages should learn how to do the fundamentals themselves. But as they master these fundamentals and attempt higher-order functions, they can delegate the basic stuff to this tool so that they can get on with more advanced-level thinking. It would be wrong to introduce it too early in students’ learning, but can be encouraged as they advance. 

ChatGPT in terms of an elevator
There are two ways to get to the destination – one is fast and easy, the other is slow and takes effort. The slow method may help keep you exercised, and the fast method may contribute to your gradual decline. On the other hand, the slow method may tire you out while the fast method may allow you to reach heights you’d never dreamed of. 

Chat GPT in terms of a multivitamin
It allows you to get what you need quickly and without much thought. The results may be positive in many ways, but you may stop thinking critically about what’s good for you. 

ChatGPT in terms of a personal assistant
By using it you can focus on what is important to you, but you may forget how to do some fairly basic things. You may become dependent on it and not able to function without it. 

ChatGPT in terms of a robotic exoskeleton
You work in tandem with this machine to increase your power. Machines are our current and future reality; they are not going away. We should learn to work with them to augment our human potential. 

One question for educators raised by these kinds of metaphors is: what do we actually need our students to do? Education isn’t only about achieving a result, but also about undergoing a process, and students need to be taken through processes such as writing a convincing essay, building an argument, or defining and researching a topic in order to fully understand them.  

When we think about what our policy on ChatGPT should be, we should consider the stage of learning students are at. When children start out learning math, we don’t give them calculators – we have them understand number, place, arithmetical calculations, and so on. Later, when they have mastered basic skills, they can use a calculator for those functions, as we are expecting higher-order problem-solving from them. Similarly, with language education, students should learn the language for themselves and not rely on AI tools. Later, when they have gained facility with grammar, words, idioms, register, and genre, we might have them delegate some of the work to ChatGPT, with the calculator analogy being most useful. 

What is ChatGPT most like for you? How does that affect how you will incorporate it into or exclude it from your teaching?