ChatGPT: Issues in Teaching and Learning 

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Standing at my trusty stand-up desk, I again pondered the beginning of this post. Yearning to recapture the muse from my last blog post, I leveled up my music selection to Snarky Puppy’s Trinity and again directed my web browser to chat.openai.com. After acknowledging ChatGPT’s stability warning due to heavy usage, I asked my question: “what are the top three teaching and learning issues with ChatGPT?” ChatGPT provided the following: 

1. Bias and ethical considerations: ChatGPT is trained on large amounts of text data from the internet and can reflect the biases in that data. This could potentially impact the accuracy and fairness of responses provided by the model. 

2. Limitations of language understanding: Despite its advanced language capabilities, ChatGPT may still struggle with tasks that require a deeper understanding of context, knowledge, or common sense. 

3. Dependence on training data: ChatGPT's ability to respond is limited to the information it was trained on, meaning it may not be able to provide information or insights on topics outside of its training data. 

I will address 1 and 3 together, first, then discuss 2. 

ChatGPT cannot avoid bias in the data. What goes in will come out. You can see in the response an error in the statement of “potential” impact on accuracy and fairness. ChatGPT will repeat and reproduce errors until corrected. Mistakes are inherent in the system because the data and user input is not without error. Does that mean tools like ChatGPT are unreliable? Well, no, it doesn’t. You and I function every day while still making mistakes. I think we can expect AI tools to do the same. 

While ChatGPT will get better at providing factual answers, it cannot provide the user with wisdom. Wisdom is more than the right answer. Wisdom is the right answer, rightly applied to the right context at the right time. ChatGPT cannot recognize context or other non-verbal data to make such a decision, nor will it ever be able to do so. And education – especially Christian education – should be about more than just reciting facts. It should be about building wisdom and insight as we learn in Proverbs 4:7. Christian educators should not be afraid of or shun ChatGPT. Instead, they should explore it as a viable educational tool while seeking God’s wisdom in order to share wisdom with others. 

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