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Editor's note: This is part of a series looking at the rise of artificial intelligence technology tools such as ChatGPT, the opportunities and risks they pose and what impacts they could have on various aspects of our daily lives.
SALT LAKE CITY — The discourse around artificial intelligence is nuanced in that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for how to handle it — much like the technology behind the phenomenon itself, it requires nonlinear ways of thinking as it integrates into the many different avenues of society.
The University of Utah recently took another step toward addressing the rise of AI and ChatGPT, hosting a panel discussion titled "Academic Misconduct, Chat GPT and the Future of Higher Education" as part of the university's Ethics Week. Panelists discussed positive aspects of AI such as it being a tool for learning and engaging technology for students as well as potential drawbacks that might come with the rise of AI, like cheating.
"We think about tools and technology — in many ways, they have not only impacted human behavior, they have influenced, they have limited and they have contracted and contrasted the course of human history," said T. Chase Hagood, senior associate vice president for academic affairs.
The discussion came just a day after OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT — announced the launch of its newest AI system: GPT-4.
"GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks," said OpenAI's website.
The good
Robert Payne, associate general counsel at the U., said one benefit he sees with ChatGPT is how interesting it is to people.
"I have four children. ... I think one benefit to it is it's exciting right now and maybe always. It's an exciting technology, it seems to engage them," Payne said. "If it can be used as a tool to generate interest, I think we learn best when we're actually interested in the subject."
Jason Ramirez, dean of students at the U., echoed Payne's point.
"I have a 17-year-old and a 12-year-old ... it's an opportunity for them to weigh different answers that they may see and know," Ramirez said. "With working families, parents being out, it's hard for them to always ask me questions so it's become a resource to them to be able to kind of get a baseline answer to a question that they may have."
The caveat to this, Ramirez added, is that he wants and teaches his kids to follow up on information they get from AI sources and take it as an answer, rather than THE answer.
Despite its immense capabilities, there are still a lot of areas where AI and ChatGPT fall short.
I think it holds faculty accountable to be experiential and to make sure there are opportunities to tie material to your own life because AI doesn't know your life and doesn't know how to make those connections. So I think there's some great opportunities there.
–Karen Paisley, assistant vice president for academic affairs
"While it is exciting, AI can't do human things," said Karen Paisley, assistant vice president for academic affairs. "It can't lead, it can't negotiate, it can't dialogue, which really puts the social sciences and those human skills as being really, really important as things that higher education can bring into that space."
From these shortcomings, Paisley sees an opportunity in that AI will challenge educators to "do better" and be more innovative when engaging in processes that can't be accomplished by AI.
"I think it holds faculty accountable to be experiential and to make sure there are opportunities to tie material to your own life because AI doesn't know your life and doesn't know how to make those connections. So I think there's some great opportunities there," Paisley said.
She added that it also has the benefit of being immediate and accessible 24/7.
"Y'all keep stranger hours than I do. I'm old, I go to bed early," Paisley said, speaking to students. "Y'all do a lot of work in the middle of the night (and) you can't find people to ask questions in the middle of the night but if you can find a chatbot, if you can find a better search engine, if you can find something that's going to facilitate meaningful answers to questions, that's helpful."
The bad
Despite the positive sides of AI and ChatGPT, there are undoubtedly some fairly significant pitfalls — especially when it comes to education.
Predictably, the foremost concern of educators and discussion panelists is the notion of how AI can be used by students to cheat and, more specifically, plagiarize.
According to data from 2020 for the International Center for Academic Integrity, 32% of undergraduates said they have cheated on an exam. Whereas, 25% of undergraduates surveyed said they've used unauthorized electronic resources (articles, Wikipedia, YouTube) for a paper, project, homework or other assignments.
The possibility of using AI and ChatGPT to cheat has even led some school districts across the country to ban ChatGPT on school devices. In February, the U. issued a letter to students outlining acceptable uses of ChatGPT.
I think it could never replace the value of an interactive educational experience.
–Robert Payne, associate general counsel
Essentially, the letter told students to seek guidance from their instructors when it comes to ChatGPT.
"I worry that this new tool is only going to ramp up that potential problem of plagiarism and I think we need to set barriers there," Payne said.
Along with this, Payne also said he has worries about the validity of the information given by AI.
So, with two definitive sides to the discussion around AI and ChatGPT, what are higher education institutions left to do?
All the panelists agreed that AI and ChatGPT is utilized best as purely a tool, nothing more.
"We use it as a tool and it gives us an answer. It is a singular answer and that doesn't entail what my values are, what my ethics are, kind of, my lived experiences — it cannot apply that into the answer," Ramirez said, adding that it does offer good opportunities for critical thinking as students try to assimilate an answer from ChatGPT into their own values and experiences.
Payne agreed.
"I don't think any significant human endeavor is going to be achieved by AI because it's only synthesizing what we already know," Payne said. "The important human leaps that we've made have been from people thinking outside the box, which I think, by its very nature, AI can't do. I think it could never replace the value of an interactive educational experience."
