Lawyers are using it. Entrepreneurs, too. Also, academics, principals, scientists and software designers. ChatGPT, a type of artificial intelligence that creates a first draft of nearly any form of writing, is the most quickly adopted software in history. Try it out. It’s fun, miraculous and unnerving.

But where does it leave students, teachers and parents?

We face uncertainty and a number of challenges, to be sure. Educators are attempting to reconceptualize their classes to meet the new reality of students equipped with artificial intelligence. We may be facing the demise of the five (or more) paragraph essay, a mainstay of schooling and the only provincial standardized test for a high school degree in Ontario (The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test). It is often the form of assessment educators in the social sciences and humanities feel most comfortable grading. But if ChatGPT can write the essay for us, will writing become passé? Will it disappear for a while only to cycle around again like cursive or timetables? What will become of plagiarism if there is no longer any reliable way to detect it? Will English cease to be the global language of business now that there is translation software that converts any language to any other? Isabel Pedersen of Ontario Tech University is one such educator exploring these writing futures.

Such challenges are also opportunities. We are looking at ways to help students build upon new tools of artificial intelligence as a leap forward. Just think of how calculators and computers have transformed our work.

ChatGPT pushes us to adopt new ways of studying and might also help us to better recognize the depth and complexity of our students. We could rely less on essay writing for assessing student knowledge, to consider a broader range of expression, like oral communication, art, podcast and film (Harvard professor Howard Gardner asked us to consider such “multiple intelligences” in the 1980s). We could learn to better value the knowledge students possess by asking them to show us how new concepts relate to what they already know about the world (legendary philosopher and educator Paolo Freire asked us to respect, and draw upon, student knowledge in the 1970s).

Artificial intelligence, with its regurgitation of general facts, could quickly bore us. The very blandness of AI answers might help us to remember the beauty and value of diversity (and humanity). ChatGPT can scan the entire internet instantaneously, but cannot access our individual memories, understandings and dreams.

This article, penned by Dr. Karleen Pendleton Jiménez, Associate Professor of Education and Gender and Social Justice at Trent University Durham GTA, originally appeared in Durham Region.com