The AI-Extended Student Mind (or: How ChatGPT Calls for a Gamification of Education)

Abstract

In this opinion piece, I reflect on teaching Philosophy of Mind to first-year students in the age of ChatGPT. I reflect on how my students perceive the LLM as a tool for studying and even call it a useful extension of their mind, echoing Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind hypothesis (1998) taught in the course. During a trial lecture for prospective university students, I was confronted with a group of students lamenting the fact that educators don’t allow the use of ChatGPT, making an already hard education process needlessly harder.

However, rather than supporting students in their struggles, ChatGPT often removes the struggle altogether. That is unfortunate, as I argue that a specific type of deliberate inefficiency makes education meaningful. I show this by comparing education to gameplay. Following on Suits’ (2014) definition of games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,” and Nguyen’s (2020) distinction between achievement and striving play, I propose that education could be usefully gamified. That is, not in the usual, trivial sense of replacing inherently valuable goals with clearer, quantifiable ones, but in the sense of inviting students to embrace difficulty, failure, and struggle as crucial moments of growth (see Deterding 2014).

ChatGPT forces educators to confront the long-standing problem of students motivated by grades rather than a desire to learn. The hyper-efficient LLM can be used to bypass some of the intellectual struggles that make learning worthwhile, help develop critical skills, and reinforce long-term understanding. But with the right kind of gamification, we can motivate students in early stages of their academic career to embrace the challenge in learning. In the age of ChatGPT, it is essential to design learning experiences that invite students to see struggle not as suffering or to be avoided, but as a rewarding activity that leads to growth.