ChatGPT: The future of the teacher in the AI Era. Are human teachers doomed to disappear?

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Since chat.openai.com and many other artificial intelligences were resealed, I’ve heard so many comments from colleagues and friends about the future of the teaching profession and how we will be substituted by super-intelligent robots that will steal our jobs. I have to admit that I also imagined that pretty female robot teaching a class and acting empathetically with every single child. However, after a while I decided to open an account at chatGPT to give it a try. Having asked several questions about various functionalities beforehand, I have not only discovered that this AI shouldn’t be seen as the end of human teaching as a profession, but as the closest thing to the assistant we have always dreamt about.

But Adriana, what makes you think that this artificial intelligence won’t replace teachers in the future?

Well, I consider that teaching, as a human profession, won’t disappear or at least won’t cease to exist very soon due to the fact that this AI still acts like a machine and not like a person; a must when teaching to children. Despite the fact that AIs have a lot of information about pretty much everything, they usually provide quite mechanical answers that seem a bit predictable. This lack of naturality and predictability might eventually be perceived by students as something easy to manipulate. This implies that in order to successfully substitute a human teacher by an artificial intelligence, such AI must be cunning enough to deal with the students’ attempts to manipulate it. This not only requires knowledge, but also sensitivity, intuition, and astute wisdom. As you know, shrewdness, sensitivity, intuition, and wisdom are characteristics exclusively found in human beings; a perfect AI substitute is still far from possessing these.

“Ok, but how did you discover that it was your perfect assistant?” you may ask.

Alright, I knew it was the assistant I had always been waiting for when I realized how much time I was saving every time I used it.

GOD! I saved toooooooooooonnnnns of time!

I’ll just mention some of the many thing it helped me with:

1. It was able to provide a list with a wide variety of activities to teach my autistic children. I frequently run out of ideas, and I struggle when creating material for them.

2. It helped to reduce my exhausting lesson planning process, by just typing the objective / standard, CEF level, age and skill and it came up with a complete and explained ESL lesson plan that I was able to analyze and improve.

3. ChatGPT also helped me to personalize exercises for my less skillful and special needs students, which saved me days of work. Believe me! I used to spend days working on this!

4. It created drafts of my learners’ report card messages, which was also a stress reliever.

But…..

It is relevant to say that any artificial intelligence is a panacea. For example, ChatGPT has a vast amount of information, but it lacks in depth.  That’s why you must always guide and improve its work, read its drafts and correct them, as well as add and erase information.

I short, after two weeks or so, Ihave had the chance to identify the pros and cons that chatGPT has as an artificial intelligence. Undoubtedly, chat.openai.com is a great tool to help teachers save huge amounts of time and to get more rest, something that is “invaluable” these days.  On the other hand, during these last few weeks, I have also come to the conclusion that artificial intelligences, as we know them today, might be easily disoriented and manipulated because of their lack of human characteristics such as shrewdness, sensitivity, and intuition.