ChatGPT: Opportunity with the New AI Tool
ChatGPT is a new chatbot – an artificial intelligence trained on a comprehensive dataset to approximate human tasks such as writing and coding. This chatbot has gained notoriety in recent months for being able to do everything from writing academic finance journal articles deemed suitable for publication by experts to passing Google’s coding interview for a high-level engineering position. Similar tools were already available, but the chatbot is a leap forward in this kind of technology. It is currently free for anyone to use.
While ChatGPT may become a powerful asset over time, there are concerns – including factual errors, faulty reasoning, obscured or uncited sources for data, and challenges to academic integrity.
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Tips for considering ChatGPT in your own teaching:
- Encourage appropriate use of ChatGPT as a tool: Ask students to use ChatGPT as a tool and cite it properly. Your students can explore the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of AI and learn to avoid the most dangerous pitfalls.
- Review submitted assignments thoroughly: ChatGPT does not properly cite real sources and may generate sources that do not exist. Additionally, instructors report that writing assignments seem excellent, but contain inaccuracies and flawed logic upon closer examination.
- ChatGPT-proof your writing assignments: Asking students to complete writing assignments in class, making assignments more reflective and personal, having students complete the writing process in steps, and grading the planning process are some ways that you can create ChatGPT-resistant assessments for your students.
- Utilize alternative assignments: Refocus your assessments to include ChatGPT-resistant assignments such as videos, portfolios, group projects, and presentations.
- Emphasize academic integrity: Stress the importance of academic integrity, starting with your syllabus and continuing in class. CITL has guidance and information on Dealing With Cheating and Discouraging & Detecting Plagiarism.
- Use a plagiarism detection tool, but understand the drawbacks: Plagiarism detection tools such as Turnitin may be helpful, but they are far from infallible when attempting to detect a chatbot. ChatGPT written content may escape detection. Princeton University student Edward Tian has created a bot, GPTZero, to detect ChatGPT, but it is imperfect – beware of false positives and false negatives.