Will chatbots that can generate fascinating articles destroy education as we know it?

New York City's Department of Education recently banned (禁止) the use of ChatGPT. "While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions," says the official statement, "it does not build critical-thinking skills, which are necessary for academic and lifelong success. "

Banning such use of technology from the classroom is a nearsighted response. Instead, we must find a way forward in which such technologies combine well with, rather than replace, student thinking. 

Banning ChatGPT is impossible in practice. Students will find ways around the ban, which will cause a further defensive response from teachers and administrators, and so on. It's hard to believe that a close race between those digital natives and their educators will end in a decisive victory for the latter. In fact, chatbots may well speed up a trend (趋向) toward valuing critical thinking. In a world where computers can fluently answer any question, students need to get much better at deciding what questions to ask and how to fact-check the answers the program generates.

So how do we encourage young people to use their minds when real thinking is so hard to tell apart from its simulacrum (假象)? Teachers, of course, will still want to watch students taking old-fashioned, in-person, no-chatbot-allowed exams to check that they do not cheat. 

But we must also figure out how to do something new: how to use tools like GPT to inspire deeper thinking. GPT often generates text that is fluent and "reasonable"—but wrong. So using it requires the same mental heavy lifting that writing does: forming an opinion, creating an outline, picking which points to explain and which to drop, and looking for supporting facts. GPT can help with those tasks, but it can't put them all together. Writing a good essay still requires lots of human thought and work. Indeed, writing is thinking, and good writing is good thinking.

One approach is to focus on the process as much as the result. For instance, teachers might require four drafts of an essay. After all, as John McPhee, the famous writer, said, "the central nature of the process is revision. " Each draft gets feedback from the teacher, from peers or even from a chatbot. Then the students produce the next draft, and so on.

Will AI one day outperform human beings in thinking? Maybe, but for now, we must think for ourselves. Like any tool, GPT is an enemy of thinking only if we fail to find ways to make it our partner.