Recent DSW grad studies ChatGPT and its potential impact on social work

Alexis Speck Glennon, DSW ’23, has co-authored a new paper that considers how artificial intelligence will disrupt social work practice in the future.

The article, titled “The End of the World as We Know It? ChatGPT and Social Work,”
appears in the Journal of Social Work. 

Lauri Goldkind, PhD, associate professor at Fordham University, led the study, along with co-authors Lea Wolf, PhD student at the City University of New York; Glennon, now an assistant professor at Colby-Sawyer College; Juan Rios, DSW, assistant professor at Seton Hall University; and Laura Nissen, PhD, professor at Portland State University. 

Released on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that responds to prompts posed as questions, producing intelligible, mostly accurate text responses. ChatGPT is built on natural language processing, a branch of AI initiated in the 1960s that seeks to program a computer’s capacity to understand text and spoken words. The introduction of ChatGPT was explosive, generating both awe and fear from users and pundits across domains, age and expertise.

Historically, social work has neither embraced nor capitalized on the opportunities presented by new technologies, and AI is no exception. ChatGPT offers us an opportunity to consider how AI will disrupt social work practice in the near term, by providing a portal through which to reflect on strategies that promote the most just use of technology. We urge social workers to join existing cross-disciplinary global conversations that purposefully engage the evolution of AI, explore its implications and advocate for its fair use.