Design, Science and Technology

OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and ChatGPT, has released a free tool that it says is meant to “distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs.” It warns the classifier is “not fully reliable” in a press release and “should not be used as a primary decision-making tool.” According to OpenAI, it can be useful in trying to determine whether someone is trying to pass off generated text as something that was written by a person.

The tool, known as a classifier, is relatively simple, though you will have to have a free OpenAI account to use it. You just paste text into a box, click a button, and it’ll tell you whether it thinks the text is very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely AI-generated.

The difference we have with ChatGPT is that it doesn’t so much present a threat to the university experience, but rather directly into the heart of the purpose of a university education – its ability to ‘teach you how to think’. There have been shadows of this in the past, for instance the hostility towards Wikipedia (Coomer 2013), the emergence of essay mills, not to mention simple, now common place tools such as spell checkers and calculators. I remember vividly a very angry professor in the early 2000s telling me that reading lists with hyperlinks would make students baby birds, with wide open mouths expecting to be spoon fed. We’ve pretty much moved through all those advancements in technology and realised their benefits, but this one, I would argue, is different. Not because it does not have its benefits, but because of the sheer volume and scale of what’s coming will be meaningfully different and ultimately challenge the foundations upon which we measure that ability to think – university assessment.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=ChatGPT

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=AI

https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Ethics

Right now, people in Higher Ed are freaking out about ChatGPT. It would be interesting to see what we think of it, 1-2 years down the road. Will it still be perceived as the destroyer of higher education assessment as we know it or just another tool to add to our teaching arsenal? It wasn't all that long ago that faculty and legislators were calling for Wikipedia to be banned on university computers.