ChatGPT – the wrong turn on the road to creative thinking

“The technological advancement has provided us with more effective means for regressing”, said English author Aldous Huxley in 1937, which even today seems to be accurate.

The Chatbot by OpenAI, known as “ChatGPT” was at the center of attention today, arousing viral interest. It is a natural dialog interface (chat) that can plan a three-day trip for you in Croatia, write code for a computer game and create your own database in any field of interest.

Sounds amazing! A technology that will save us cognitive effort, vast amounts of time in any field, but one can only wonder whether this advanced technology is perhaps leading us down the wrong path in all matters concerning creative thinking.

Many experts have already expressed their criticism and doubt concerning this new technological innovation, which gives rise to questions of reliability and factual precision, questions that lead to the conclusion that in its current state the AI chat will oblige the user to continue to activate critical thinking abilities. I say that this technological advancement will oblige us to pay a different price, a price that is not a question of ‘if’? but rather the well-known and familiar question of ‘what’?

Good technologies do not only solve problems and answer to genuine needs, they also create new problems, a sort of side-effect that we all need to take into account. Many well-known people have said this before me: Marshal McLuhan, the renowned Canadian philosopher who coined the phrase ‘the global village’, said that any expansion of the human race, particularly technological expansions, have an effect of amputation or change to another expansion. For example, motorized transportation takes us quickly from one place to another, but creates environmental pollution, causing us to be less active and less healthy.

The concern, therefore, is that the use of ChatGPT, which emphasizes results and objectives, canceling the process and the journey, will injure higher thinking processes and abilities of decision making and extraordinary problem solving.

As said, the new technology solves all our problems without us having to make any effort, creating results that we can judge and evaluate in terms of compatibility to what we wanted. We don’t have to think or be creative any longer. No need to activate the imagination. And so, instead of the important bottom-up way of thinking, that creates and develops results derived from the effort invested in thought, focus remains almost entirely in top-down thinking and analysis in the form of criticizing an existing result. Instead of writing code, there is code-review. However, research shows that it is important to alternate between the two forms of thinking (bottom-up and top-down) for problem solving.

What will happen to human skills?

At the focus of 21st century educational programs lie the new skills and abilities required to contend with the challenges of humanity. This education emphasizes the development of skills to deal with complex issues and with finding creative solutions for a rapidly and dynamically changing world – ‘thinking outside of the box’, creativity, working in development teams, being able to conduct effective and useful interpersonal communications, to operate ethical thinking, to think independently, etc.

Institutes of higher education as well as the education system have realized the importance of these skills for the 21st century. When we meet the students we lay emphasis on these skills, and present them with challenges in project-oriented courses, in organizing hackathons that require out-of-the-box thinking and creative effort, as well as many other activities in the various courses. All these may be lost if we succumb to the short road of technology.

ChatGPT is here to stay, and so all interested parties need to think of how to ensure moderate, level headed and monitored use to ensure gain without losing the important abilities that characterize the human race. Alongside the interested parties we should all think about the price artificial intelligence requires of us and how not to rid ourselves of creative thinking along the way.