Assuming you haven’t been living under a rock for the past six months, chances are you’ve at least heard of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, one of many such AI-powered tools that have been grabbing headlines, prompting questions about the future of work and challenging long-held notions of what it means to be sentient.
At Avon High School, Lydia D’Amato’s career and financial management students put the chatbot to work Monday creating skits meant to illustrate the pros and cons of buy now, pay later programs, which D’Amato’s students have been researching as part of a broader unit on credit.
Students told ChatGPT what they wanted it to do - create a two-person skit showing the benefits of buy now, pay laters programs, for instance - and the chatbot obliged, creating a setting, characters and dialogue in accordance with the prompt.
It even generated intentional punctuation, meant to influence the way in which certain characters delivered certain passages - an exclamation point at the end of a line meant to be read with excitement, for instance.
After confirming the accuracy of factual claims in the skit ChatGPT generated, students performed them during class Monday.
D’Amato said it was the first time she’s incorporated the platform into any of her lessons and that she made a point of speaking with her students about the circumstances in which it would be appropriate to use a tool like ChatGTP.
“I explained it to them that this isn't a creative writing class, so it's not like were cheating because we were told to write a script and we’re having the computer do it for us,” she said “Just like anything else we’re using the Internet for, you shouldn't just copy and paste it and hand it in and call it your own - let’s just use this as another tool to say ‘Hey, we know what buy now programs are all about, we had to research that first, let's just have it help us share that out with our classmates in a creative way.’”
D’Amato said she sees ChatGPT and other platforms like it as another tool in the toolbox, something that could prove useful when conducting research or “taking information and transforming it in a creative way.”
Jake W., Sage P. and Owen W. perform a skit on some of the cons of buy now, pay later programs as part of a unit on credit in their career and financial management class. The skit was created by ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot from Open AI.