The advent of Artificial Intelligence chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022 was celebrated by students, academics and researchers in higher education institutions, especially in the developed world.
This magical chatbot (chat robot) was initially considered as an important tool to use in writing assignments, research papers and the production of notes and other crucial texts that could be used for academic and other purposes. No sooner was AI ChatGPT being embraced than it attracted vehement criticism from some of the universities that had given it a green light for their students, academics and researchers to use in the production of academic work.
But what is AI ChatGPT? How is it used in academic work? ChatGPT (OpenAI), “which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a natural language processing tool that allows users to have a personalised conversation with an artificial intelligence robot capable of providing detailed responses to any question posed.”
In simple terms, when it comes to higher education, students have an artificial intelligence tool at their disposal that they can use to answer assignments by just engaging into a conversation or conversations with it. This chatbot or generative artificial intelligence writing tool produces texts that answer the questions posed by students, including obviously the assignment questions students received from their lecturers in any discipline of study.
ChatGPT produces academic texts, including in-text references, and also draws references for the assignments so that in the end, students just do a little bit or nothing to their assignments before putting their personal details on cover pages and submitting the assignments for grading. No more long nights of battling with research and reading many sources to get answers and critiquing other scholars’ findings for students – they have the artificial intelligence tool doing the work for them when they provide it with questions to answer.
In this case, there is no input and originality from the students who use this technological tool to do academic work for them. From the look of it, ChatGPT promotes laziness among students, who are tempted to solely rely on this information-generating tool. Also, the serious question of plagiarism arises when students submit texts that they have not created themselves as their answers to assignment questions.
According to Mimi Leung and Shuriah Niazi (2023), “the powerful language model can generate human-like text, write prose, poetry and essays, etc, for students and explicate the style of an author,” for example, William Shakespeare or Chinua Achebe. This rubbishes the call for academic integrity, which university lecturers make to students. We should, therefore, stop talking about ethics in academia when we allow this to happen. I just imagine what kind of graduates universities would produce if universities also allowed students to use ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools when writing their examinations.
As I see it, this artificial intelligence writing tool does not promote creativity, critical thinking and originality in students. These are some of the most important skills they need in life and at the workplace. While I agree that we are living in a digital world powered by artificial intelligence in all facets of life, and I do not want to sound too conservative and an enemy of the advancement of artificial intelligence, you will agree with me that if our universities give a blanket nod to the use of ChatGPT by our students, that will be putting a death knell to our education system, which already has its own challenges.
However, some universities around the world have completely banned the use of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools in the production of academic work by their students and academics. .
Yet, other universities have embraced the use of artificial intelligence tools by their students. These universities have argued that ChatGPT must be given a chance in academia. They further argue that universities must train their students to appreciate the benefits and challenges of using digital technology in academic work.
In this case, universities are encouraged to be more positive about AI, and train their staff and students to adapt to the new dispensation of academic work being produced by machines. Universities, therefore, need to allay fears associated with the use of artificial intelligence tools in academic work by encouraging debate and using best-practices from other parts of the world.
History shows us that some years back, there were debates on the use of Wikipedia in academic work. Today, it is ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus and others, and tomorrow it is going to be another novel app. Email address: kjairos@gmail.com