The Singapore Ministry of Education is embracing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in schools – including ChatGPT from OpenAI – but calls for caution.
ChatGPT is a next-gen chatbot that uses advanced AI to generate streams of human-like text based on prompts from users. The tool has received growing attention in the past few months for its ability to produce content that resembles human writing and has raised questions about its potential uses in various industries, including education.
Singapore Education Minister, Chan Chun Sing, spoke in Parliament about the Ministry’s approach to using AI tools in the classroom, and how they will guide teachers and students in their responsible use. Despite concerns about the potential for abuse and cheating, the Minister believes that AI tools like ChatGPT can be a valuable learning tool if used properly.
According to the Minister, students will be taught to understand the fundamental concepts of AI, but not to rely on them. In the face of potential cheating, he emphasized that there is still much work that AI tools cannot accurately replicate, such as analysis and field notes, and that schools will be using various methods to assess students’ competency, making it more difficult to use AI to generate answers.
Amid raised concerns about the potential exploitation of ChatGPT for assisting students in cheating and asked if measures were in place to prevent incidents of plagiarism, Minister Chan said schools will be using AI-powered tools to detect plagiarism in students’ work, and students will be taught to be discerning when reviewing results generated by AI tools.
“As ChatGPT can provide inaccurate or biased output depending on its inputs, students need to be discerning and critically assess its output for accuracy and objectivity.
“If some tools can help you to derive a better answer, so be it. But we expect all our students to declare truthfully where the sources of information may come from,” he added.
The Singapore government has further released a reference guide for local businesses and IT professionals, the AI Ethics & Governance Body of Knowledge. A governance testing framework and toolkit, A.I. Verify, has also been launched to help organisations demonstrate their responsible use of AI.
