AI: A Brilliant but Biased Tool for Education

When ChatGPT, the large language model (LLM) AI that can generate long, detailed answers to complicated questions, was first made accessible to the public in November 2022, it changed the landscape of education forever.

“As you can imagine, people were and still are apprehensive. I would describe faculty as on a spectrum between sanguine and despairing,” says Dr. Joseph F. Brown, director of academic integrity at The Institute for Learning and Teaching at Colorado State University (CSU). Faculty members, Brown recalls, were worried that students would use ChatGPT to cheat and bypass any difficulties they encountered, negatively impacting learning.

Dr. Joseph F. BrownA perfect solution was not easy to find. Some institutions turned to other AI software to assess assignments’ originality in the same way institutions assess for plagiarism. But this method led to its own problems, including students’ work being falsely flagged as AI-generated.

Now almost a year since its release, Brown says CSU faculty and administration are coming to terms with the fact that “policing students’ use [of ChatGPT] is probably impossible, usually ineffective, and definitely inefficient.”

Instead, CSU faculty and educators across the nation are discovering ways to adjust their pedagogy to accommodate this brave new world, not only through the creation of AI-proof assignments but also assignments that purposefully incorporate AI use. Those assignments acknowledge the usefulness and the limitation of the technology, which cannot detect or differentiate human bias and negative stereotypes in the almost limitless field of data and information from which it pulls its answers.

Experts say educators have a responsibility to rethink how they assess learning and help their students gain mastery over AI tools like ChatGPT and other LLMs so they graduate into the world fully ready for their future in a technologically dense workforce. Using AI as a tool will not only better prepare students for the future, experts note, but can also help ease the workload of faculty and administration.

“Faculty need to be clear when they are working with students that one of the primary limitations of AI, generative AI, and LLMs is they are crowdsourcing information — by definition, providing for you a majoritarian view of the world,” says Dr. Inara Scott, senior associate dean in the College of Business at Oregon State University.