By Deirdre Hughes
Founding Director of CareerChat (UK) Ltd & Hon. Associate Professor Warwick University IER, England
Imagine being able to embed an AI chatbot link into every classroom whiteboard. It could allow teachers and students to quickly carry out searches, get feedback, supply study tools and even provide personalised coaching on different subject matters. The interactive learning environment could revolutionise teaching practices; by making lessons more interesting for students and, at the same time, helping teachers save time by automating repetitive processes – freeing them up to concentrate on specific needs within the classroom. It is one vision for the future. But are chatbots really that effective? And are schools and the teaching profession ready to adapt?
AI explosion
The recent whirlwind of artificial intelligence (AI) generative software announcements has sparked interest across the globe. ChatGPT software known as GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) can do things like technical writing tasks such as composing songs, writing screen plays, and/ or supporting individuals with their curriculum vitae (CV), job search and career readiness preparation. ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard all have the ability to complete such tasks, including many potentially relevant to education. And for teachers and career development professionals, chatbots can save time, energy and resource.
But – no chatbot is perfect, at least at the moment. That is why it is crucial to keep human advisors in the loop. For example, a bot can help give a student advice about future careers and job vacancy information. But it is critical to also have support from careers or employability advisors. Encouragingly, a curated chatbot can be trained to provide trustworthy information and handovers to career development specialists.
The explosion of large language models
Today’s chatbots are smart enough to converse in ways that feel authentic. And with increasing access to large language models (LLMs), an AI system can be trained on large amounts of text data. They can understand natural language and produce human-like responses to inputs. These models use advanced machine learning algorithms to understand and analyse the nuances of human speech.
But what about reliability? Many claim that LLMs can be deceptive or inaccurate, and that this somehow prevents them from being used productively. For those most vulnerable in society, there are dangers if an individual believes everything Chat GPT tells them – and it does make things up sometimes!
So it is obvious: the designers of career chatbots have to ensure they are ethical and effective. These include respecting privacy considerations, being explicit about where they source careers information, and ensuring built in feedback and monitoring mechanisms. It is possible for designers of ethical chatbots to extract from reliable data and this can add value to career conversation flows. This can act as a powerful accelerator of learning, both within and outside of the classroom.
Curiosity and Creative thinking
AI chatbots are cutting-edge technology. By being curious and creative in thinking about how chatbots can be applied in a careers support context, educators, and careers advisers will increase their confidence in making greater use of reliable and robust data in their everyday practice.
Careers professionals can use this tool and data intelligence to help students. Strategically, trends in students’ career readiness behaviour and preferences can also feed into a more responsive and personalised careers education programme. We are only just beginning to see the full potential of the ‘AI revolution’, and I suspect more and more schools will want to take part in it.
