Correcting papers for his class of world religions, Northern Michigan University Philosophy Professor Anthony Auman read what stands out as the best paper to date on whether the burqa ban is ethical, and was structured in clear paragraphs, with pertinent examples and reasoning. He immediately became suspicious and when he came face to face with his student, he asked him if he had written the article himself, while he admitted that he used GPT, a robotic speech generation application that provides information, explains concepts and turns ideas into simple sentences – and in this case, he wrote an article.

Noise Auman decided to change the way he assigns essay writing this semester, intending for students to first write drafts in class where they could use Internet browsers that record and restrict any use they make. Students will then be asked to document any changes, and Auman plans to introduce the use of the app in classrooms by asking students to rate her responses to questions she will be asked.

“We are talking about the end of an era in the educational process, while humanity is being asked questions, for example, what exactly is this robot thinking about, which seems to have come from another planet,” he said.

Across the US, scholars like Aumann and their leaders, deans, and rectors have begun to transform the educational process since the advent of ChatGPT, in what could be the beginning of a huge shift in teaching and learning. Some instructors are completely overhauling the courses they teach, adding more oral exams, group assignments, and handwritten instead of printed text.

Such moves are part of a real-time battle with a new wave of technology development that has come to be known as “productive artificial intelligence.” Released just last November by the OpenAI lab, ChatGPT is one of the most advanced programs of this wave, causing a huge shift as it composes text with almost human structure and subtle nuances, answers short topics, and is already being used for love letters, poetry, literature, as well as school and scientific work.

Prohibition of use

A fact that alarmed some middle and high schools when their teachers and administration tried every time to find out if their students were using the app. The education systems of some US states, including New York, have already banned the tool from their Wi-Fi networks and school devices to prevent this form of next-gen copying, although it’s certainly easy for students to find non-standard ways to access the app.

However, in the field of higher education, universities fear the effectiveness of a possible ban, which also raises the question of academic freedom. A fact that implies that the way of teaching needs to be changed.

As Joe Glover, dean of the University of Florida, states, “Attempts are being made to institutionalize general principles to enhance the ability of the instructor to deliver the course, rather than efforts to target specific copying techniques, as this will not be the last. we come up with innovations face to face.”

This is an indisputable fact, since we are talking only about the early stage of the development of artificial intelligence. OpenAI will soon release another application, GPT-4, which is even better in terms of text generation than its previous programs. Google has created the LaMDA program, which is a competitor, while Microsoft is considering investing $10 billion in OpenAI. Silicon Valley startups are also involved in the development of the sector.

An OpenAI spokesperson acknowledged the program’s potential misuse to deceive people and said the company is developing technology to help recognize text generated by the app.

Most popular discussion topic

At many universities, ChatGPT is now a leading topic of discussion, with rectors setting up working groups and organizing academic debates on how this new tool should be handled, with many in favor of adapting to technological evolution.

At many high-profile US universities, professors are moving away from homework that dominated during the pandemic, as it is now considered easy to complete with robotic speech-generating applications, in favor of classroom, handwritten, and group assignments, while exams are often are carried out orally.

Students will no longer hear the phrase “Write five pages on such and such a topic.” Some professors try to come up with topics they think would be too difficult for AI programs and ask their students to write about their life events and current situation.

As Sid Dobrin, director of the English Department at the University of Florida reports: “Students become plagiarizers because the subjects they are asked to plagiarize,” while another university student plans to start teaching new or less studied texts for which the application may have less information , such as Shakespeare’s early sonnets instead of his famous plays. According to him, the GPT can thus push scientists to overcome repetition and refer to texts that are not available on the Internet.

Changes in scoring method

In the event that plagiarism prevention proves futile, many professors are planning to introduce stricter rules about what they ask of their students, as well as how they are assessed, since well-placed and structured text alone is not enough.

“Imagination, creativity and innovative analytical spirit, which are now rated as excellent, from now on should only touch very well.”

Universities also plan to teach students how to use new AI applications, even making them a required course for freshmen in light of the value of academic integrity.

Some institutions are revising their academic integrity policies to include such programs in the definition of plagiarism. According to some, the current rules are outdated and need to be revised.

The abuse of AI tools isn’t expected to stop anytime soon, so some scientists are planning to use crawlers like Turnitin, which should include AI app usage recognition features this year.

In addition, more than 6,000 professors at major institutions such as Harvard and Yale have applied to use GPTZero, a program that promises to instantly identify text written by artificial intelligence programs.

Some students find the new tool useful for the learning process as it can provide new ideas. However, as one of them said, ChatGPT sometimes misunderstands concepts and misquotes sources.

But others have no such worries: online forum discussions are blazing, and the #chatgpt hashtag on TikTok has amassed more than 578 million views.

In the video uploaded there, we see a student copying a multiple-choice questionnaire and bragging about having no idea about the course and wishing everyone else “good reading.”

• ChatGPT: An innovative robotics app that raises concerns that students will copy their work, but is also a potentially educational tool.
• DALL–E 2: A system that makes it possible to create digital images simply by describing what a person wants to see also carries risks for some.
• GPT-3: With impressive language capabilities, this natural-speech system can write, reason, and generate code with huge potential future implications.