The advanced-language chatbot systems of ChatGPT and GPT-4 have become a real game-changer for college students, so much that professors are now worried about the erosion of academic integrity and actual learning in the classroom.
ChatGPT, which launched in November, has already garnered 100 million users. It's an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It was also built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 and GPT-4 families of large language models.
In an informal poll from January, according to The Hill, 17% of Stanford University students admitted to relying on ChatGPT in their fall finals.
Most of the survey takers said they used AI to brainstorm or outline subjects. And a small share of respondents said they submitted ChatGPT work as their own, The Hill reports.
"I think this is the greatest creative disruptor to education and instruction in a generation,” said Sarah Eaton, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary who studies AI.
Prior to advanced chatbot technology, policing plagiarism was a simple process for college professors, who could easily check Wikipedia or other published websites to make sure the students weren't copying or parroting information about a subject.
But in a ChatGPT world, new words and detailed descriptions can be produced on the fly, making it more difficult for professors to identify the cheaters.
"It's lot harder with ChatGPT because it produces different answers every time. So there, it's sort of more like, the professor has to put their question or prompt or whatever in the ChatGPT, maybe do it a couple times, and then try to show that there’s more similarity between the suspected essay and ChatGPT responses than there is between the suspected essay and sort of like a range of other student responses," said Justin Shaddock, the chair of the Honor and Discipline Committee and an associate professor of philosophy at Williams College.
According to The Hill, one Canadian study, which has yet to be published, found that "two-thirds of professors could not correctly identify texts" written by AI technology.
"When you get two-thirds of university professors failing a test," said Eaton, "we’re in a bit of a pickle."
To counter ChatGPT, professors have been exploring ways to engage students without the chatbots being useful — such as requiring students to brainstorm assignments and essay drafts, instead of just one final paper.
Columbia College in Chicago reportedly formed a task force after one professor caught a student "pretty flagrantly" using ChatGPT for answers on a quiz, according to Stephanie Frank, an associate professor of instruction in religion and the humanities.
For that incident, Frank said that a Columbia professor canceled a quiz and instead requested students to submit handwritten class notes.
The student in question provided handwritten notes that were apparently copied from ChatGPT, said Frank, via The Hill.
The technology may be worrisome to college professors. But they also realize that advancements in this high-tech industry will continue, which means they'll have to adapt to the times.
"I know that we are exhausted from COVID. We had to pivot once, and now we're being asked to pivot very quickly again," said Laura Dumin, an English professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, who administers a Facebook group of 2,000 faculty members to discuss positive uses for AI.
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