By Nick Pantages
@nick_pantages22
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term we hear all the time, and it often has an extremely negative connotation associated with it. On college campuses, like here at Springfield College, the unknown of what AI truly does is what creates some of these unfavorable overtones, and no other piece of technology truly represents that like ChatGPT.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT spread like wildfire through social media posts and word of mouth, and by the time 2023 rolled around, everyone had heard of it. With just a few prompts it could write 1000 word essays that replicated a human’s words, despite being written by robots.
That created plenty of paranoia from faculty, as they scrambled to find a way to prevent students from completing three-week assignments in seconds.
The ability to turn in a fully AI written assignment is something that can and should be penalized. However, ChatGPT and AI technology is not something that should be completely shunned and ostracized from the minds of students. ChatGPT can also help some students in other ways for completing tasks and assignments.
Its ability to be used as a research tool, as opposed to a mechanism for cheating and a quick passing grade on a paper students don’t want to write is what makes it useful.
Instead of prompting it to write your paper, you can ask ChatGPT or the chatbot of your choice to find potential topics you could write a paper on in a given domain. AI can also scour the internet for sources to use in a paper, while the students can specify what type of source they need, whether it is peer-reviewed, a primary source or news or magazine articles.
Although ChatGPT sources can’t directly be provided through links, a quick Google search of the name of the sources it gives you will bring you right to them.
A scenario like this completely encapsulates the usefulness of AI technology in academia. Oftentimes you need to master the art of Google searches to get exactly what you are looking for. The Springfield College Library’s online database does have a lot of good information and is very easy to navigate, but sometimes you just can’t find exactly what you want for an extremely specific topic. With AI, having the freedom to ask for the exact type of source on your desired topic makes daunting research a lot easier.
More specifically to Springfield College, the lack of decisiveness on how AI fits into school policy is what creates the gray area on what can and can’t be used. That is not for lack of trying, the school is doing their due diligence on figuring out what might be acceptable in a learning environment.
However, there is nothing explicitly listed on the Academic Honesty Policy yet on AI and what is deemed unacceptable use of it. The closest thing to it is in the Creative Work section, saying, “A piece of work presented as the individual creation of the student is assumed to involve no assistance other than incidental criticism from any other person. A student may not knowingly employ artwork, story material, wording or dialogue taken from published work, the Internet, motion pictures, lectures, or similar media, without full acknowledgment.”
The lack of an outright claim that it is okay or not okay is what creates the divisiveness on technology like ChatGPT, but as long as it is not being used to completely cheat and turn in assignments without actually doing anything, it should not be outright banned.
Photo courtesy of ChatGPT.