Feature by Alexa Juliana Guerra
Imagine this: it’s 3am on a Friday morning and you are cramming your Arts 1 essay which is due on that morning. You are rushing, trying to plan the flow of your essay and conducting research to supplement your points. As you’re doing all this, you are also racking your brain trying to think of many ways to write your essay at a quicker pace. This is when you remember that there is an AI program that can do this for you: Chat GPT.
Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (Chat GPT) is an AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory founded by Elon Musk alongside other entrepreneurs and programmers. It sources data from sources like the Internet, books, and websites. It uses Natural Language Processing which provides computers the ability to “understand text and spoken words in much the same way human beings can” (IBM, n.d.). The AI program is capable of writing essays, translating words and phrases from different languages, creating lists, and other purposes.
The ability of Chat GPT to produce essays has been controversial, especially in the academic settings due to its threat to academic integrity. Given that the program can provide responses that are conversational in tone, it will be difficult for instructors to distinguish whether outputs were genuinely written by the students or generated by the chatbot. It could also worsen the disparity between the academic performances among students. Students with direct access to Chat GPT could use it to create their essays for them, whereas students who do not have any access to the program will need to write their essays on their own, resulting in more privileged students gaining an unfair advantage (Cotton, et al., 2023). Furthermore, the program is not fully producing factual information. In an experiment ran by NBC New York, it was found that Chat GPT has the potential to be used in the spreading of misinformation.
The issue on the use of AI programs for essays and other academic works was addressed by faculty members of the University of the Philippines in January 2023. In a statement by the Faculty of UP Diliman Artificial Intelligence Program, outputs created with the use of Large Language Model Systems (LLMs), such as Chat GPT, were condemned as these are misrepresented as “valid scholarly works”. The statement reiterated that students must be the sole creators of their work. However, “the use of AI tools to enhance and facilitate the students’ learning should be encouraged” (UPD AI Program, 2023).
Given all the information, as future statisticians and data scientists, it is crucial to ask: What can we learn from the issues surrounding Chat GPT? As future developers of this kind of technology, how can we ensure that our programs are used ethically?
REFERENCES
Cotton, D. R., Cotton, P. A., & Shipway, J. R. (2023). Chatting and cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2023.2190148
Diliman Information Office. (2023, January 18). Statement by the Faculty of UP Diliman Artificial Intelligence (AI) Program on the Use of AI Tools in the Academic Environment. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://upd.edu.ph/statement-by-the-faculty-of-up.../
Glorioso, C. (2023, February 23). Chat GPT and its potential to spread misinformation, fake news. NBC New York. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://www.nbcnewyork.com/.../chat-gpt-and-its.../4120520/
What is natural language processing? IBM. (n.d.). Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://www.ibm.com/ph-en/topics/natural-language-processing
Comments