The artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has shaken educators since its November release. New York City public schools have banned it from their networks, and professors are improving syllabus(教学大纲) to prevent students from using it to complete homework. The chatbot's creator, OpenAI, unveiled a tool to detect text generated by artificial intelligence to prevent abuse.
However, there is one subject area that doesn't seem threatened. It turns out ChatGPT is quite bad at math.
While the bot gets many basic arithmetic questions correct, it makes errors when those questions are written in natural language. For example, ask ChatGPT "if a banana weighs 0.5 lbs and I have 7 lbs of bananas and nine oranges, how many pieces of fruit do I have?" The bot's quick reply: "You have 16 pieces of fruit, seven bananas and nine oranges."
Debarghya Das, a search-engine engineer, tried to explain why this happens in his Twitter. "Just imagine if you ask a room of people who have no idea what math is but have read many hieroglyphics(象形文字), 'what comes after 2+2,' they might say, 'Usually, we see a 4.' That's exactly what ChatGPT is doing." But, he adds, "math isn't just a series of hieroplyphics, it's computation."
Another reason that math teachers are less worried by this revolution is that they have been here before. The field experienced dramatic changes for the first time decades ago with general availability of computers and calculators.
"Math has had the biggest revolution based on the system of any mainstream subject," said Conrad Wolfram, the strategic director of Wolfram Research, which developed Mathematica, a technical computing software program.
The broader lesson is that AI, computers and calculators aren't simply a shortcut. Math tools require math knowledge. A calculator can't do calculus unless you know what you're trying to solve.
In general, AI will likely ultimately be most useful for those who already know field well: They know the questions to ask, how to identify the shortcomings and what to do with the answer.
