Will ChatGPT Make Society Worse? Noam Chomsky Believes It's Just a 'Way of Avoiding Learning'
Innovations are meant to disrupt—industries, technologies, and creativity. Most innovations nowadays come in the form of new apps or platforms, but every now and then, something groundbreaking arrives that shakes up our existence as we know it. We saw it happen with social media when Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok reframed our social lives. We saw it happen with e-commerce changed the way the world approached consumerism. And we’re seeing it happen again with ChatGPT, the AI that’s powerful enough to battle Google.
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ChatGPT is at the cusp of changing the society we know now. The AI tool can write essays in seconds, papers in minutes, and answer questions faster than Google. Within days of its launch, one million users downloaded ChatGPT in just five days, faster than any other major platform in decades. Investors have lauded the platform for its progress, while workers have called out the AI tool for potentially replacing jobs in the future and schools have banned ChatGPT from campuses to avoid plagiarism. This innovation seems to be a double-edged sword until safeguards are in place to ensure everyone uses ChatGPT responsibly.
One critic who’s less than impressed by ChatGPT is Noam Chomsky himself, one of the greatest intellectuals of our time. While Chomsky recognizes that ChatGPT can be useful for something, education is not it. In its current incarnation, ChatGPT is “basically high-tech plagiarism” and “a way of avoiding learning,” according to Chomsky. When it comes to human education, it presents more cons than pros. How can students learn and understand the rigor of research if they can just ask ChatGPT to do it for them? Unlike Google, which requires a level of research and analysis, ChatGPT requires neither. And that’s not even considering the plagiarism factor.
“For years there have been programs that have helped professors detect plagiarized essays,” said Chomsky on the EduKitchen YouTube channel. “Now it’s going to be more difficult because it’s easier to plagiarize. But that’s about the only contribution to education that I can think of.”
But it’s not quite as black and white as that. Chomsky admits that should students resort to ChatGPT than doing the work themselves, then it might be an indication that the education system is failing its students if they’re so willing to avoid learning altogether.
“[If it] has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out,” said Chomsky.
From that perspective, it might infer that ChatGPT could just be a symptom instead of the root cause of something going wrong in our society today. Has the oversaturation of information negated the pursuit of knowledge? Has advanced technology only made it easier for humans to try less? Has society crumbled so much that humanity is willing to let AI take over?
Just some food for thought.
