Dear Editor,

Please allow me to share with your readers my opinions on artificial intelligence (AI) and education, not only in Jamaica but globally.

Any educator who has not paid attention to at least one of the large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google Bard, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Claude, or any of the others that now proliferate the technological landscape is not ready and will not be ready to teach in this dispensation unless and until he or she acquaints himself or herself with one of these chatbots.

Pontificating about something that one knows nothing about is foolish and unbecoming of anyone who professes to teach. Of course, the field of AI is much wider than LLMs. However, these will be our focus at this time.

The world has changed considerably since OpenAi made its generative pretrained transformer ChatGPT 3.5 available to the general public in November 2022. By January 2023 there were over 100 million subscribers. That alone should cause anyone involved teaching and learning to become aware that this should not be taken lightly. How many of us were using the search engine Bing? Bing was resurrected by ChatGPT. Google had to create its own chatbot Bard, which was released to the general public in March. A number of apps using generative pretrained transformers (GPT) technology were created and released to the general public. This list is certainly not exhaustive. Curiosity should be enough to get educators to pay attention.

This is the best thing that ever happened to force educators to change the way they teach and assess learning outcomes.

Any educator who is unaware of the massive changes that have taken place in society since OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the general public is unworthy of being in the classroom. Educators must equip themselves to respond to the threats and opportunities that AI provides.

Every area of our lives is affected by AI. Can we count on our educators to be the thought leaders in these uncharted waters?

Winnie Anderson-Brown

winabenator@gmail.com