The clamour around ChatGPT is deafening right now. It’s amazing, there is no denying that. I use it all the time, and its potential for reducing teacher workload in the future is huge. But I have seen several teachers / edtech leaders posting that they are already investigating integrating it into their curriculum. My opinion is that they should proceed with caution and there are five main reasons for this:

1) It’s in beta. It is absolutely not a production-ready service. I think it would be prudent for educators to watch and see how it develops, particularly now that Microsoft is building it into its product set.

2) It’s not up-to-date. The model as it stands was only trained on data up to 2021 so anything after that date simply doesn’t exist in ChatGPT’s world.

3) It has questionable opinions. In fact, Chat GPT has been accused of being racist and misogynistic. Would you invite a speaker with that reputation into your school to work unsupervised with pupils?

4) You have to be 18 or older to use it. So planning lessons where students use it as a research tool is out of the question at present.

5) Other brands are available. Google has its own developments in the pipeline! Interestingly they have claimed that they are not releasing them yet precisely because they don’t think the technology is ready for mainstream use, citing ‘potential reputational damage’… If Google is concerned about this then maybe schools should be too.

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