MADISON, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who studies technology in education said artificial intelligence holds promise in schools.

What You Need To Know

  • When ChatGPT was first released, one of the top concerns was students cheating 

  • David Williamson Shaffer is a professor and researcher at UW-Madison

  • He said AI language models have great potential for students, although we don't know how it'll be incorporated yet

David Williamson Shaffer is the Sears Bascom Professor of Learning Analytics at UW-Madison. He got into this work after being a teacher in the 80s and 90s.

“Graphing calculators and computers were just starting to come to the place where they were impacting the classroom, were a kind of change agent,” Shaffer said. “They were a way in which the old system was disrupted just enough that we had a chance to rethink a little bit about what we were doing.”

The most recent disruptors are AI language models like ChatGPT. They work by aggregating information from all over the internet, applying social and writing norms, and coming up with answers. Shaffer said on well-known topics, they can do pretty well. He said they can struggle to answer new questions, and users may take the model “filling in the gaps” as fact. Plus, he said they’ve been shown to have biases.

Shaffer said with a technology so new, everyone is just trying to find the next steps.

“Students are trying to figure out what they can do with the new technology, and parents are worried about what their students can do with the new technology,” he said.

He said overall, he feels for teachers the most. They’re the ones in classrooms having to deal with these changes in the moment.

“Teachers are trying to figure out how it should fit in the classroom,” Shaffer said. “School boards and policymakers are trying to figure out what policies they should put in place.”

One of the common worries when ChatGPT was released was that students could use it to cheat. Shaffer said a small portion might account for this, but cheating is nothing new.

“I actually think [cheating] is one of the least interesting parts about what these new technologies are going to do in education,” he said.

Instead, he’s looking forward to the possibilities.

“We can construct activities, assignments, curriculum where we expect that what students will be doing is learning to work with these tools in order to prepare themselves for what’s going to happen when they leave school, which is almost certainly that they’re going to be using these tools in the workplace,” Shaffer said.

He said some teachers are already doing just that.

“For example, you’re going to ask ChatGPT to write an essay on a controversial topic, and then discuss it,” he said. “What did ChatGPT get right? What did it get wrong?”

While the future is unknown, Shaffer said AI isn’t going anywhere.

“The thing to think about is actually not necessarily the technology itself. It’s what world do we want it to create?” Shaffer said. “The challenge with a very new technology is we don’t actually know what kind of world it’s going to create.”

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