AI technology is getting more sophisticated each year, developing skills that can increasingly rival those of humans in the fields of writing, art, and problem-solving. Chat GPT is the latest AI to cause a stir due to its exceptional abilities in replicating human writing. It has been shown to be capable of writing high-quality essays, poems, stories and articles. So could this technology pose a threat to our current systems of education? Here’s a look at what Chat GPT could mean for students.
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It’s easy to see how Chat GPT has the potential to be used by students in university to solve problems for them or write their essays for them.
Where a student would previously have to pay money to get an essay from an essay mill, Chat GPT is available for free. Plus, the quality of its output is high enough that it reads like human speech for the most part, and can put together cohesive paragraphs on any number of subjects a student may plug into the programme as prompts. This could lead to inequalities in the system where a student who used an AI for a few minutes could receive the same grade as a student who went through weeks of hard work and research.
Chat GPT Cannot Do Everything
However, while this technology can do many things a student can do, it can’t do everything. Most university-level essays use prompts that draw from specific information from the course. Chat GPT draws on the Internet as a whole rather than course materials, which means it’s likely to neglect key concepts unless the question is very specific.
It also gets into trouble when it comes to citations, and is liable to misattribute or make up information in order to fit the structure it is trying to replicate.
Perhaps most importantly, it isn’t capable of the high-level insight that is expected of university students.
That doesn’t make Chat GPT useless, though. Some educational experts have suggested using the technology in the classroom.
By using the AI to generate an essay, students could then be tasked with conducting an analysis of the work, looking for weak spots in the argument and fixing inaccurate or poorly structured sections. Normally, students would have to draft their own work before doing this kind of an editing exercise. This would enable students to be able to work on their higher level writing skills without having to worry about things like spelling and grammar.
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