EP 74: Should Schools Ban ChatGPT?

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Should schools be banning chat, GPT and other AI systems? Or should they just be letting students use them and run wild? Well, that's one of the things that we're going to be talking about today on Everyday AI. This is your daily livestream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me not just understand what's going on with AI, but how we can all actually use it to our advantage, like students. I know students are using ChatGPT, but before we get into that, as a reminder, if you're joining us live, let me know what you think. Should colleges and universities and schools be banning these AI systems? Let me know. Sometimes we feature some of our favorite comments in our daily newsletter. And as a reminder, if you're joining us on the podcast, check in the show notes and actually checking the comments here of the live stream. We have a couple other podcasts that are talking about other aspects of this. But before we dive into this and we talk about it, let's first talk about what's going on in the world of AI news. Okay? All right, so the OpenAI CEO has shared his concerns about AI influencing elections and he has a lot of concerns. So Sam Altman, he is the OpenAI CEO. So you know the company that has given us Chat GPT. So his kind of tweet that he shared, or I think it's called X now. So his ax that he shared. Does anyone know what we call tweets now? Anyways, what Sam Altman said on the the platform formerly known as Twitter, he said, I am nervous about the impact that AI is going to have on future elections, at least until everyone gets used to it. And he's talking about personalization, one on one persuasion, combining that with high quality generated media is going to be a powerful force. All right, that is the quote from Sam Altman. So a lot to unpack there, but we're going to save that for another episode. Let's go on to our next kind of news piece for today. So criminals, yeah, criminals. They've been, they've created their own Chat GPT clones. We've talked about this in the newsletter a couple of times, but there are some kind of dark web large language models popping up and starting to kind of gain some popularity. So why? A new Wired report looks at some of these underground large language models. Some of the more, I guess popular ones are Worm GBT and Fraud gbt. So why would cyber criminals want to use large language models? Well, it takes the guardrails off completely. So you know, tools that we use like Chat GPT and Bard and you know, Cloud from Anthropic, they all have guardrails built in. So not only do these kind of dark web large language models like Worm GPT and Fraud GPT not have guardrails, but they are explicitly being used for scamming and phishing purposes. So if you want to know more about that, make sure to check out the newsletter. Our third piece of news, deepfake speech, is getting almost too good. So a new University College London study showed that more than a quarter of people could not identify if a voice was a deep fake AI clone or if it was real. All right, so these, these, these deep fake cloned voices aren't anything new. They've been around for a long time. But some, some recent updates have made it almost indistinguishable to know if a voice is AI or if it's real. I'll let you guys know. I am, I am real. I'm joining, joining you live. So thank you all for joining me live. So as a reminder, please give me your question, give me your thoughts or questions on this topic of today. Now that we get back to it, should colleges ban chat GPT and other AIs? So as a reminder, before we dive into that, make sure to go to your everydayai.com if you want to know more on those stories that we just shared about. We're going to have a lot more in our free daily newsletter. All right, well, good morning and thank you for joining us. Val, thank you for joining us. You know, one of the things that I love about the live stream is having great working professionals out there who are, who are like me, trying to keep up with Chat GBT and to learn everything. So always like to shout them out when they join us. Nancy saying, to ban or not to ban. What would Shakespeare say? I'm not sure, but ChatGPT is actually great at writing Shakespeare. So let's get into it. Let's get into it. And again, as you have questions, please let me know. But should colleges ban Chat GPT? You know, sometimes guys, I, I draw this out and I make you guys wait a long time to get to the end of it. But I'm going to start at the end, all right? And we're going to work our way backwards. And I'm going to say no, Chachi or schools should absolutely not ban chat GPT. Here's why. That would be very like saying that we're going to ban the Internet, right? Which would be an asinine thing for a college or university to do. I don't think people fully understand or realize large language models yet, right? And what they can be used for. One of the best use cases, I think it's not actually writing, right? We think, oh, like ChatGPT can, can write all this information. I think large language models are actually one of their best and most underutilized use cases is researching and analysis, right? So let me, let me also just put this out here too, because it's related. I'd say very few universities, colleges, high schools understand large language models, right? They just think, oh, you know, we'll, we'll put some rules in place or maybe we'll ignore it and it'll go away. It won't. But if you aren't even sure what a large language model is, let me just quickly share that. Right? And I know for some of you guys, this might be like, very repetitive and redundant. You're like, all right, I use this every day. But I think it's important we set the stage. So a large language model, put very simply, is essentially a collection of everything that's ever existed on the Internet, right? So the most, some of the more powerful large language models we would say are ChatGPT or GPT4, which is. They haven't said exactly, but it's rumored to be about 1.8 trillion parameters. So, so think of that 1.8 trillion data points, right? So when we Talk about banning ChatGPT and a lot of, you know, colleges, universities, professors might be saying, oh, students are going to use it to write. What about the researching side? Right? That's. That, that's one of the things I love most about ChatGPT is being able to cut down on the amount of time it takes to research something, right? If you're trying to learn a new, a new subject, a new topic, whether it's for school or whether it's for work, a lot of times you have to go down a Google rabbit hole and you end up reading 10, 12, 15, 20 different web pages, right? If you can properly use a large language model like ChatGPT, it is a learning superpower. The ability, if you know how to use a large language model to accurately get the information that you want and to help you to understand something. I think right now is one of the most underutilized parts of a large language model. All right, so I know, I know we have a lot of comments here and I want to get to them. So Kevin is saying, shameless plug. I will be do. I will be doing a lunch and learn on what LLM is this coming Wednesday. Yeah, Kevin, feel free to drop that in the comments. Fabian saying, since the creation of Wikipedia, students have taken the easy path to do plagiarism. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, so now that you have my hot take, let's, let's unravel this a little bit because I say colleges and universities absolutely should not ban Chat GPT, mainly because they don't know what a large language model is or how students are using it. Let's put this out out there as well. I'd say the overwhelming majority of students, yes, they are using Chat GPT to write their papers. All right, sorry. If you're a university professor or something right now and you think your students aren't they, a hundred percent are. They're not doing the greatest job at it because also a lot of students don't know how to use a large language model, but they are, period. So if you think your students aren't they, 100% are. We actually have some, some, some great that I left in the comments here if you're watching the live stream, and we're going to have it in the show notes as well. But there's a great, great tip from one of our former guests, Kelsey Barringer, from, I think that was episode 55, just on how to properly leverage AI in the classroom. She had a great tip on what professors or teachers can do to kind of combat that. So make sure to go back and give that a listen. So let's talk about a couple things. I'm going to share some things on the screen here, but don't worry if you're listening on the podcast. I'm going to walk you through it, talk you through it. Okay, a couple big questions that we have to talk about because here's why students are going back to school right here in the US Some colleges are actually starting, you know, this Monday or maybe next Monday, but most colleges and universities, high schools are going to be going back to school within a week or so. So a couple questions. Is Chat GPT and other late large language models, are they even good enough? Right. Absolutely, Absolutely. So we shared about this in a previous daily newsletter, but a student at Harvard, she was, I think, pretty forthright about it, told her teachers as much, kind of like a little experiment. But Chat GPT wrote all her papers. This Harvard student. So you, you know, you might think, oh, you know, for maybe a high school paper. Sure. But not hard, hard college. Right. Or a challenging university. It could never work. Absolutely it did. So a Harvard student used CHAT GPT for all of her papers. Got a 3.3 GPA, right? Pretty amazing. So the next thing that's important to know is AI content detectors. All right, so this has been a new thing because this is kind of like, what, semester four, I guess, since CHAT GPT was rolled out in November of 2022. So this is technically the fourth semester where chat GPT has been available for students. So a lot of people think, well, hey, there's content detectors, AI plagiarism detectors, and it's going to show if students are using CHAT GPT. Right? And there's a pretty, pretty, pretty famous story that came out a couple months ago where a professor flunked all his, all of his students after CHAT GBT falsely claimed they wrote their papers, right? So this professor, unfortunately didn't fully understand how large language models worked and flunked a bunch of, bunch of their students saying, hey, you use ChatGPT. Here's the thing with content detectors, right? So there's these new services platforms that are selling the software to educators, to schools and universities saying, hey, your Students are using ChatGPT to write their papers, buy our software, use our software, and it's going to tell you if students are using ChatGPT or not. Here's what, here's what people aren't saying those detectors don't work. They are problem. I'm, I'm not, I'm not going to say garbage, but they are pretty much useless. Okay, here's another, another kind of study or article to look at when it was looking at the effectiveness of these AI detectors. So this, this study revealed that they only had an accuracy of detecting AI generated text 28% of the time. Right. So what's that mean? That means flipping a quarter would be entirely more accurate than at determining, you know, blindly closing your eyes and saying yes or no is, is more accurate than these, than these AI detectors, these AI content detectors, right? They don't work. They don't work. All right, so let's do a quick recap. Do I think schools should ban CHAT GPT? Absolutely not. Is CHAT GPT good enough to, to write papers at a high level? Yes. Have schools and universities try to ban it? Yes. Are they successful in, in policing CHAT GPT usage in large language models? Absolutely not. Because these, these AI content detectors, you know, OpenAI actually publicly shut theirs down two weeks ago because they Said it wasn't accurate. Right. So what can colleges, universities do? Right. Yes. Like, like Celeste just said here in the comments, OpenAI just can discontinued its AI detection program. Yeah. Because they said it wasn't a viable technology. So what should colleges and universities do? What do you all think? Drop me a comment, let me know as I unpack this just a little bit more. What do you think they should do? If you're listening on the podcast again, check the show notes. There's a way to email us. You know, add me on LinkedIn, all those things, and I want to hear from you. What do you think schools and universities should be doing? I have some thoughts here as we wrap up the show. They should be encouraging the use of ChatGPT and other large language models and other AI models as well. Right? Because we haven't even talked about things like Mid Journey for AI art or Runway for AI video. Right. But I think colleges and universities should be encouraging these things. I think they should be teaching large language models and other AI systems. They should. Yeah, Some. Some great comments. Brian just says teach it. Simple as that. Right? I agree. May Brit saying I think they should combine AI with traditional learning. No reason to ban or ignore it in her personal opinion. If I was a university professor, I would be requiring my students to use ChatGPT or other AI models every single day. To discourage the use of AI in the classroom is like discouraging students to use the Internet to learn and find more. Right? Because we also think we want to be preparing students for what it's like in the real world. Right. Once you, you know, enter the, the workforce, once you get your real job. Because guess what, y'? All, in real life, in the workforce, in real jobs, the companies that are moving the most ahead, the companies that are making the biggest splashes, the companies that are the most profitable for the most part, are those companies that are already using large language models, that are already using different AI systems, you know, to. To research and to create, to ideate, to, to analyze their competitors. So if what's working in the workforce is using and adapting to AI technology in general, why would we discourage that in the university or in classroom settings? We should be encouraging it, because if we're not encouraging it, we are doing students a disservice just to. To try to ban it or to try to use these AI content detectors that aren't accurate. Right. We even did our own internal testing a couple months ago. We had about a zero percent accuracy because it's very easy to get false positives. Or false, false negatives on these AI content detection systems. But if we're not preparing students for what it's like in the real world, we are doing them a disservice. So our hot take Here at everyday AI is this. Students should be using ChatGPT. Universities should be encouraging it and actually working it into the curriculum. I, I agree with, with another comment here that Nancy hall just said. She said fighting against it causes more problems that it solves. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, so let me know, let me know what you think. I hope this was a fun conversation. I hope it was also a little enlightening because I think there's so much, I think there's so much gray area when it comes to large language models and AI in academia. It's one of those things that I think schools and universities are just trying to hope it goes away or they think it's maybe a fad, right. Or they think that maybe ChatGPT is a phase in our journey, but it's not. Right? Large language models are here to stay. They are the future of the Internet. Look at what Microsoft and Google are doing for traditional search. They're phasing traditional search out with a more hybrid search. That is like talking to a large language. A large language model, it is a skill, right? Prompting is a skill. Knowing when and how to use different large language models, it's a skill and it is a highly sought after skill right now in the workforce. Right. Even just prompting. Right. Prompt engineering. Right. Which is a funny, funny job title. But anyways it's, it's one of the fastest growing fields, if you will, is, is prompt engineering. Right. So if we are trying to ban or to prohibit learning these new AI systems, large language models, we are taking away students abilities to get a job in the real world because that's what companies want. That's what I want. Right. Like if someone was applying for a job, the first thing I would ask them is how are you using AI? Right. And if a student said oh well, it was banned so I didn't use it or oh, I just, you know, use it to write my papers. Right. We should be teaching students the ins and outs of, of every important AI platform and system that makes companies go. All right, thank you for joining us. I hope that you enjoyed this topic on if schools should ban chat GPT. So as a reminder, please go to your everyday AI.com sign up for our free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping this conversation and a lot of other things that you might have missed, right? A lot happens, even on the weekends. It's it's Monday morning here, so make sure you check out your everyday AI.com if you're listening on the podcast. We have some great other resources in the show notes, so check those out and I hope to see you back tomorrow and every day with Everyday AI. Thanks.

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