Open generative AI changes a lot, but not everything

摘要

Technology is again a timely topic at this moment in our profession. The appearance of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has brought an unprecedented level of public awareness and appreciation of language—both English and other world languages. The November 2022 appearance of generative AI embodied in ChatGPT ignited a combination of curiosity, imagination, and trepidation among the public. The Economist named “ChatGPT” the word of the year for 2023, with the explanation that “nothing can stop technology from dominating this year's words” (The Johnson Column, 2023, para. 7). ChatGPT captivated the attention of the public with its language performance: “The breakthrough in particular of large language models (LLMs) has been stunning. They produce prose so human-like that they have ignited a debate about whether LLMs are actually thinking (and whether students will ever do homework without them again)” (The Johnson Column, 2023, para. 7). Similarly, The New Yorker’s Sue Halpern summed up 2023 with a column entitled “The year A.I. ate the internet: Call 2023 the year many of us learned to communicate, create, cheat, and collaborate with robots” (Halpern, 2023). These are but two of the many examples of how the public media in the United States has weighed in on the publicly accessible generative AI unleashed over the previous months. need to articulate and communicate the value of language study in a social context, identify what technology offers that is positive for language education, rethink how we organize our teaching in light of technology's affordances, and be clear about what technology cannot do. (Kern, 2024, this issue, p. XX) He opens the conversation with a discussion of the new technological capabilities offered by generative AI—specifically, machine translation and ChatGPT—and with concrete suggestions for prompting students’ “critical engagement with technology guided by human teachers” (p. XX). This inflection point suggests that it is time to grapple again with our understanding of the significance of language, language teaching, and our roles as language professionals. After all, language is at center stage. Google has been responding admirably to our queries for information for years with lists of sources, links, and more precise questions for us to explore. We already had access to copious information. ChatGPT captivated the world with its language: the grammatically idiomatic, responsively contingent turn taking in natural written conversation. It soothed our sensibilities that have been irritated for years by repetitive, irrelevant responses from robotic chatbots positioned between us and the personalized information we sought from websites built to mitigate the need for human communication. This is the time for us as language professionals to increase our own critical engagement with language and language technologies in a world never so fascinated by language. As a founding faculty member of the doctoral program in Applied Linguistics and Technology at Iowa State University, I am accustomed to watching the evolution of technology as it changes the ecology of language teaching, learning, and assessment. Over the past decades, technology has delivered a continuing stream of important issues for us to study and countless avenues for expanding learners’ access to language and culture learning while developing agency as language users. The constantly evolving technologies of the past should have prepared us well for the entrance of ChatGPT, but it is necessary to stop and consider what we have learned from the past. Taking Kern's (2024, this issue) prompt to consider our preparation for this moment, I recall three episodes where I find clues for understanding the opportunity presented by the technical accomplishment manifest as generative AI. The first episode is the 50-plus years of navigating technology in language learning through research and practice. The Modern Language Journal has documented a fit