Op-Ed: Don’t ban chatbots in classrooms — use them to change how we teach

Will chatbots that can generate sophisticated prose destroy education as we know it? We know that GPT is the ultimate cheating tool: It can write fluent essays for any prompt, write computer code from English descriptions, prove math theorems and correctly answer many questions on law and medical exams. That is, it cannot do what the education philosopher John Dewey, more than a century ago, called reflective thinking: “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it.” Technology has for quite a while been making rote knowledge less important. But we must also figure out how to do something new: How to use tools like GPT to catalyze, not cannibalize, deeper thinking. In “Phaedrus,” Plato wrote that Socrates lamented the invention of writing: “It will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” Writing, Socrates thought, would enable the semblance of wisdom in a way that the spoken word would not.