Grading, customer support, assessment: How Indian edtechs are using ChatGPT

Illustration by Suneesh Kalarickal

After OpenAI released ChatGPT for public use in November, Vaibhav Sisinty, founder of Sequoia Capital-backed Growth School, jumped onto the software, intrigued by the hype around it.

Sisinty began using the popular chatbot as a virtual assistant, which helped him generate emails and Slack messages based on simple briefs he fed it.

“It helps me maintain a tone for all my messages, which is very helpful as a founder. Lately, I have also started using it to summarise long blog posts and sometimes to generate unique names for internal projects. All these features save a lot of my time,” he said.

His interactions with ChatGPT, which responds to queries in a human-like manner, have not stopped since. As various teams at Sisinty’s startup experimented with the software, they discovered use-cases for it within Growth School’s curriculum.

“I have hundreds of hours of content. We're feeding it to the tool. Tomorrow, if a student asks a question, the OpenAI model can give them an answer based on our content and information available on the internet,” he said.

Sisinty isn’t alone. From grading to customer support, innovative assessment methods, and content creation, higher ed and upskilling startups are experimenting heavily with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), the technology underpinning the viral chatbot. Moneycontrol spoke to startup founders who shared use-cases while experimenting with ChatGPT.

The founders also voiced concern over how advances in such technology, with Google’s newly introduced experimental conversation AI service Bard also joining the race, can impact education and the job market in the long run, which does not seem to be recovering amid a bearish macroeconomic environment.

Also Read | Bard: 10 things to know about Google’s answer to ChatGPT

How Indian upskilling startups use ChatGPT

“It is changing the way we think about learning, particularly when it comes to upskilling. It offers the chance to learn much faster and more efficiently than ever before,” said Mayank Kumar, cofounder of edtech unicorn upGrad.

Kumar said that while the software is at a nascent stage, its impact on learning and upskilling is 'undeniable and revolutionary.'

Eruditus chief Ashwin Damera shared how his company plans to use ChatGPT within its curriculum.

“Grading is a use-case and ChatGPT already does it quite well actually. That can have very large implications. People can increase the amount of summative and descriptive assessment because now grading is fairly automated,” Damera said.

He is looking to create innovative methods of assessment. For instance, as an assignment, the Eruditus chief said he asked students to critique an essay that he earlier made ChatGPT write.

Siddharth Maheshwari, cofounder of Newton School, said the tool can be revolutionary for teachers and course creators.

“It will allow them to find new ways of teaching. For example, when they are going to teach certain concepts in the classroom, ChatGPT can come up with solutions, examples, and even assignments. I think it's going to enhance our level of learning,” he said.

Most founders said their companies use ChatGPT to create content.

“We can now feed the course transcript into the software and ask it to summarise the benefits of the course or write the ‘who is this course for’ section. Those are some powerful use-cases,” said Damera.

Timeline for integration

Earlier, Coursera's chief Jeff Maggioncalda, while speaking to Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum in Davos, shared how the chatbot has kept him awake at night as it opens up immense possibilities for companies like his to help people learn.

Maggioncalda said Coursera, which competes with Indian startups upGrad, Eruditus, and Simplilearn, is looking to integrate ChatGPT into courses offered by the company this year.

While integration is in the research phase for some startups in India, others have started using ChatGPT for functions like content on their websites.

“We have already started writing a lot of articles on our free resource section on our blog on relevant topics using ChatGPT,” said Krishna Kumar, founder of Simplilearn. Kumar added that the company’s curriculum team is experimenting with how to best use the software.

Newton School’s Maheshwari said his company has begun integrating the software into its products.

“We have questions that students can answer after taking a course on our website. We are feeding those on ChatGPT to generate new questions of the same type for us,” he added.

While Eruditus has started exploring use-cases within its curriculum, content, and marketing functions, Damera said it will still be a year before there is clarity on how they plan to use the tool in the long run.

“What will accelerate the process is if there will be companies who will use ChatGPT, build around it, and offer complete solutions to startups. Those solutions will probably get better traction in the marketplace versus each individual company trying to build on that,” said Damera.

Damera said such integrators will make life much easier by creating simpler APIs (application programming interfaces) based on ChatGPT and GPT for startups to plug into.

Two-edged sword for edtech

While the edtech sector has an optimistic outlook for the software, founders also voiced a word of caution.

“ChatGPT can be seen as a two-edged sword for education. While it can provide great opportunities for learners, it can also add a lot of dependencies on them, lowering their abilities to write independently,” said upGrad’s Kumar.

Kumar has a point. In most cases, while the software has given out responses that are correct or at least make sense, there have been instances of misinformation with ChatGPT too.

“I asked ChatGPT why Berhampur (my hometown) is known as the cotton city. It gave me five pointers on why it is called that when actually it is known as the silk city of Odisha. It just made up stuff like agriculture is good, cotton cultivation is strong and so on when cotton doesn’t even grow in those parts of Odisha,” said Sisinty.

Newton School’s Maheshwari said AI can be exposed to malicious sources who might be able to produce fake history and content, which could have a severe impact on impressionable minds since credibility matters a lot in education.

“There's no way for AI to correct itself. So if it's exposed to the world, it can’t unlearn. Worse scenarios can happen. For example, in the medical line, let's say AI is right 99 times, but if it’s wrong even once, it can hurt human life,” he said.

With the updated version - GPT-4 - due by the end of 2023, there’s hope for faster advancement of the technology, which may help reduce the inaccurate responses. The entry of Google, which is unveiling an experimental conversation AI service called Bard in its bid to catch up with ChatGPT, might also speed up improvements.

Threat to jobs

Founders said as fast as this technology advances, it might pose a threat that can keep startup employees awake at night. upGrad’s Kumar said the introduction of ChatGPT is forcing the sector to rethink how it approaches the workforce.

“While some jobs are getting redundant due to advances in technology, we need to find ways to use it to complement humans instead of replacing them. This would enable the creation of an efficient and productive ecosystem,” Kumar added.

Startups have already laid off about 3,600 employees in the first month of 2023, continuing to cut costs to achieve profitability as venture capital and private equity funding dries up.

Damera agreed that jobs might get affected in the long term, but also said it is too early right now.

“We are just cross-checking whether it actually works or not. If the quality is so great that the conversion is better, then it makes more sense. That will take a longer time to measure because it's still quite early,” he said.

However, startups do see jobs taking a hit within content creation, customer support, and other functions that can be easily automated.

ChatGPT itself sees a brighter picture for humans in the age of AI. When asked if AI can result in job cuts, here’s an excerpt from what ChatGPT had to say:

In the long run, ChatGPT and other language models are likely to augment human capabilities rather than completely replace them. Jobs that require creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and human interaction are less likely to be affected. It's also worth considering that the adoption of this technology will require significant investment and expertise, further protecting jobs in the short to medium term.

AI and humans to coexist?

Growth School’s Sisinty agrees that both AI and humans can coexist but believes humans need to learn how to use it better.

“You have to make machines understand exactly what you want and it will do the job for you. Whoever does this job better is going to win – it’s as simple as that,” said Sisinty.

upGrad’s Kumar said the software is here to stay, especially in how we create content and how content enables learning.

“However, its future outcomes are still uncertain and only time will tell how it will shape the learning and upskilling landscape,” he added.