When the alphabet （字母表） was first invented, Plato, a great philosopher of ancient Greece, was worried that those who adopt it would not use their memories and thus appear to be a know-it-all but actually know nothing. So if Plato were alive today, what would he say about ChatGPT?
ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence program released recently by OpenAI, is a significant advancement that can produce articles comparable to good high school essays.
When I asked ChatGPT a range of simple questions, the answers were well-reasoned and clear, It's also interactive: I could ask for more details or request changes. But then, on trickier topics or more complicated concepts, ChatGPT gave completely wrong answers.
However, that doesn't mean ChatGPT can't be a useful tool in education. Schools have already been dealing with the Internet's wealth of knowledge along with its misleading essay mills （制造厂）. One way has been to change how they teach. Instead of listening to a lecture in class and then going home to research and write an essay, students listen to recorded lectures and do research at home, then write essays in class, with supervision（监督）, even cooperation with peers and teachers. This is called flipped classrooms （翻转课堂）, in which students wouldn't use ChatGPT to create a whole essay. Instead they'd use it as a tool to generate critically examined building blocks of essays.
Plato was wrong to think that memory itself was a goal rather than a means for people to have facts so they could make better analyses. The Greeks developed many techniques to memorize poems like the "Odyssey", with its more than 12, 000 lines. Why bother to force this if you can have it all written down in books?
As Plato was wrong to fear the written word as the enemy, we would be wrong to think we should resist a process that allows us to gather information more easily. The way forward is not just to lament （为……而遗憾） the replacement of skills, as Plato did, but to recognize that as more complex skills become essential, our society must educate people to develop them. Value people as people, not just as packs of skills. And that isn't something ChatGPT can tell us how to do.
