After its viral launch last week, the chatbot ChatGPT was lauded online by some as a dramatic step forward for artificial intelligence and the potential future of web search.
But with such praise also came concern regarding its potential usage in academic settings. Could the chatbot, which provides coherent, quirky and conversational responses to simple language inquiries, inspire more students to cheat?
Students have been able to cheat on assignments using the internet for decades, giving rise to tools meant to check if their work was original. But the fear now is that ChatGPT could render those resources obsolete.
Already, some people online have tested out whether it's possible to have the bot complete an assignment. "holyyyy, solved my computer networks assignment using chatGPT," one person, who later clarified the assignment was old, tweeted. Others suggested that its existence could result in the death of the college essay. One technologist went as far as saying that with ChatGPT, "College as we know it will cease to exist."
Artificial intelligence company OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding cheating concerns.
However, several experts who teach in the field of AI and humanities said the chatbot, while impressive, is not something they’re ready to sound the alarm about when it comes to possible widespread student cheating.
"We’re not there, but we’re also not that far away," said Andrew Piper, a professor of language, literatures and culture and a professor of AI and storytelling at McGill University. "We’re definitely not at the stage of like, out-of-the-box, it’ll write a bunch of student essays and no one will be able to tell the difference."
Piper and other experts who spoke with NBC News likened the fear around cheating and ChatGPT to concerns that arose when the calculator was invented, when people thought it would be the death of humans learning math.
Lauren Klein, an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, even compared the panic to the philosopher Plato’s fears that writing would dissolve human memory.
“There’s always been this concern that technologies will do away with what people do best, and the reality is that people have had to learn how to use these technologies to enhance what they do best,” Klein said.
There’s always been this concern that technologies will do away with what people do best, and the reality is that people have had to learn how to use these technologies to enhance what they do best.
— Lauren Klein, an associate professor at Emory University
Academic institutions will need to get creative and find ways to integrate new technologies like ChatGPT into their curriculum just like they did during the rise of the calculator, Piper noted.
In reality, AI tools like ChatGPT could actually be used to enhance education, according to Paul Fyfe, an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University.
He said there’s plenty of room for collaboration between AI and educators.
“It’s important to be talking about this right now and to bring students into the conversation," Fyfe said. "Rather than try to legislate from the get-go that this is strange and scary, therefore we need to shut it down."
And some teachers are already embracing AI programs in the classroom.
Piper, who runs .txtlab, a research laboratory for artificial intelligence and storytelling, said he’s had students analyze AI writing and found they can often tell which papers were written by a machine and which were written by a human.
至于担心人工智能崛起的教育工作者，Fyfe和Piper表示，这项技术已经用于教育的许多方面。
计算机辅助写作工具，如Grammarly或Google Doc的Smart Compose，已经存在，并被许多学生长期使用。像Grammarly和Chegg这样的平台也提供剽窃检查工具，因此学生和老师都可以评估一篇论文是否部分或全部抄袭了其他地方。Grammarly的发言人没有回复置评请求。Chegg的发言人拒绝置评。
那些接受NBC新闻采访的人说他们我们还不知道任何检测人工智能是否写了文章的技术，但他们预测很快就会有人利用这项技术。
就目前而言，Piper说，对人工智能论文的最佳防御是教师了解他们的学生以及他们如何写作，以便抓住他们工作中的差异。我们要睡觉了。
当人工智能达到满足学术任务所有要求的水平时，如果学生使用该技术在大学里滑行，Piper警告说，这可能是对学生的一个重大损害。教育。
目前，他建议使用一种更古老的技术来消除学生对使用ChatGPT作弊的恐惧。
"它将重新唤起人们对纸和笔的热爱。他说。
