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AI IN EDUCATION
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News experiences of information technology serving up trustworthy Similarly, it would be better to teach students how to fact-check
answers. “This technology is notorious for hallucinating, creating what they get out of LLMs, including whether it applies to their
How the chip sector false citations, for flat out making things up,” he says. country, rather than try to stop its use entirely.
is gearing up for Without mitigations, “that’s a recipe for catastrophe, education-
the AI revolution
ally speaking”. One answer is to teach students how such sys- lAnguAge leArning
tems work so they understand their limitations, but Bennett adds LLMs may have particular benefits when it comes to learning
How ISC2 aims
to overcome that some of his colleagues are concerned that LLMs could fur- languages. Thailand-based language education service Ling
cyber barriers ther reduce the size of the common set of knowledge that most already offers a chatbot which draws on its existing content and
people share, a source of cohesion for society. accepts predetermined sets of answers. The company is work-
Editor’s comment ing on using LLMs to extend this to allow customers to talk about
leArn from pAst mistAkes what they like and for the chatbot to take on all sorts of roles. This
Buyer’s guide Mat Pullen, senior education expert at device management and could allow fine degrees of personalisation, such as practicing a
to the future of security specialist Jamf, has worked as both a teacher and a lec- forthcoming situation or having the chatbot adopt the accent and
business software
turer on education. He agrees with Bennett on the potential for vernacular of a particular region of a country.
large language models to help get students started on writing, LLM-linked services could interact for as long as someone wants
Harnessing large
language models and is concerned that schools will repeat the mistakes he thinks to use them, cover a huge range of subjects and languages, work
for education many made by blocking YouTube and Wikipedia when they were consistently and improve over time based on feedback.
first introduced. Simon Bacher, Ling’s co-founder, thinks these will eventually
Earlier this year, New York’s Department of Education blocked replace online services that use human tutors. “In five to 10 years,
the use of ChatGPT, although it later reversed this decision. I don’t think this industry will exist as it is right now,” he says.
Although Jamf can block the use of LLMs on its customers’ The propensity of LLMs for making things up matters less in
managed devices, Pullen says it has generally received enquiries fictionalised role-playing. “If it tells me wrong facts, it doesn’t really
about whether this is possible rather than instructions to do so. matter for language learning,” says Bacher. But it can be a problem
He says that when schools blocked YouTube, students for linguistic rules. LLMs are best at English, which has relatively
accessed it covertly elsewhere and the opportunity of using it few rules and dominates the internet. Bacher, a native German
for self-guided learning was lost. Teachers worried about what speaker, says ChatGPT is pretty good at his first language but
students could find on the service. “For me, filtering is a skill to does make linguistic mistakes, which makes people “lose trust”. It
teach children,” says Pullen. is also prone to occasional errors in French, he adds.
computerweekly.com 21-27 November 2023 18
