"AI won’t be the death of the essay, but it may change it."
With new applications like ChatGPT revolutionising technology, the new phenomena of AI technologies are sweeping the globe.
With the use of ChatGPT, an advanced language model created by OpenAI, it is now possible to have discussions in natural language.
This technology is already being used in many different businesses and has the potential to revolutionise the way we produce written content.
However, several difficulties need to be carefully examined while using ChatGPT in education.
ChatGPT may enable students to cheat on tests or homework for higher grades.
The application can produce writing that resembles that of a person, making it challenging for teachers to identify pupils who are cheating on projects or essays.
This kind of AI might be abused in a variety of ways by students and young people.
This includes stealing the copyrighted works of well-known writers, and completely disrupting the education system.
After testing ChatGPT by having the AI create several exam answers, Kevin Bryan, an associate professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto claimed he was “shocked” by the capabilities of ChatGPT.
Bryan runs an AI-based entrepreneurship programme and carefully monitors the market.
He said: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework.”
It’s important to note that ChatGPT does not search the internet for solutions as Google Search does.
It also tends to respond in a more mild, simple way.
The chatbot has been trained by OpenAI to reject “inappropriate requests” such as those for creating instructions for making a bomb.
Bryan said that when he gave the AI several tasks, some of which required combining knowledge from diverse areas, it performed “better than an average MBA”.
Although there are issues with ChatGPT, Jonathan Bailey asserted that the traditional essay, which has been losing favour for years, is still alive and well.
In Plagiarism Today, Bailey emphasised that the traditional ‘essay’ assessment will still apply to students:
“Despite the challenges, there are still times when an essay is an appropriate assessment tool.
“Even if it ceases being the default or the gold standard, the essay will likely remain as a tool instructors use to assess student’s grasp of the material.”
Bailey’s interpretation of AI overthrowing traditional means of student assessments suggested that we could see a difference in how educators assess students.
He added: “AI won’t be the death of the essay, but it may change it.”
With a new tool that can help teachers determine whether a student or artificial intelligence did the assignment, the creator of ChatGPT is attempting to reduce its reputation as a tool for students to cheat for higher grades.
On January 31, 2023, Open AI launched the new AI Text Classifier and followed a weeks-long discussion at schools and colleges over fears that ChatGPT’s ability to write just about anything on command could fuel academic dishonesty.
OpenAI warns that, like other tools previously available, its new one is not flawless.
Jan Leike, head of the OpenAI alignment team tasked with making its systems safer, stated that the mechanism for recognising AI-written material “is imperfect and it will be wrong sometimes”.
Leike emphasised that the system will still have flaws.
“Because of that, it shouldn’t be solely relied upon when making decisions.”
Teenagers and students were among the millions of people who began experimenting with ChatGPT after it launched on November 30, 2022, as a free application on OpenAI’s website.
However, creators of the application have said that cheating students can be curbed if they input a longer passage of text – the longer the text, the better the tool is at detecting if an AI or human wrote something.
Leike said: “We don’t fundamentally know what kind of pattern it pays attention to, or how it works internally.
“There’s not much we could say at this point about how the classifier works.”
Universities are among other educational institutions questioning the ethical usage of AI.
One of France’s most prominent colleges, Sciences Po, recently forbade its usage and issued a warning.
The university said that anybody caught using ChatGP, or other AI tools casually to generate written or oral work might be removed from Sciences Po, and other institutions.
In response, OpenAI policy researcher, Lama Ahmed, stated that it has been working for several weeks to create new rules to support instructors in response to the criticism.
Ahmed said: “Like many other technologies, it may be that one district decides that it’s inappropriate for use in their classrooms.
“We don’t push them one way or another. We just want to give them the information that they need to be able to make the right decisions for them.”