This week, Mr. Myke Healy touches on the excitement, opportunities and challenges of the rapidly evolving world of generative AI. At TCS since 2004, Mr. Healy is the assistant head of Senior School - teaching & learning.
Written by guest blogger, Myke Healy
On last week’s episode of The New York Time’s Hard Fork podcast – which focuses on new technology such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) – I was surprised by the host’s answer to an ethical dilemma. An online gig worker questioned whether he should disclose to paying clients that he simply completed assigned tasks using ChatGPT. Host Casey Newton gleefully encouraged capitalization on this arbitrage, predicting it would only last until employers realized (in three months? in six months?) that the work could be done without paying a human.
Arbitrage is the buying and selling of an asset in different markets to exploit a price discrepancy. For example, in 2018, a trader could buy a bitcoin in the U.S. for $10,000 and sell it immediately for $15,000 on Korean exchanges, an arbitrage dubbed the “Kimchi premium.”
As teachers, school leaders and the commentariat grapple with the impacts of generative AI on education, we are in the age of AI arbitrage. AI tools are increasingly being used in productive, disruptive, imaginative and disquieting ways before regulators, K–12 schools and universities can determine how best to implement guardrails and guidelines.
At TCS, we are rewriting our academic integrity guidelines to take generative AI tools into account. The equilibrium sought: our desire for students to harness transformative AI tools balanced with the expectation that work must reflect their own understanding and effort. Instead of students using generative AI as a secret tool of academic arbitrage, we must teach them to use the tools appropriately, ethically, transparently and with attribution.
Properly acknowledging, citing and attributing ideas to generative AI models is a collective societal challenge and the topic for a future article once we figure it out!
