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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.

ChatGPT is only two months old, but we've spent the time since it debuted debating how powerful it really is — and how we should regulate it. 

Just because it can be helpful doesn't mean it can't also be harmful: Students can use it to write essays for them, and bad actors can use it to create malware. Even without malicious intent from users, it can generate misleading information, reflect biases, generate offensive content, store sensitive information, and — some people fear — degrade everyone's critical thinking skills due to over-reliance. Then there's the ever-present (if a bit unfounded) fear that RoBoTs ArE tAkInG oVeR.

And ChatGPT can do all of that without much — if any — oversight from the U.S. government.