Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools

Is ChatGPT for everyone? Seeing beyond the hype toward responsible use in education

Montreal AI Ethics Institute article by Marianna Ganapini, Pamela Lirio, and Andrea Pedeferri.
Jan. 3, 2023

ChatGPT is the latest Open AI chatbot, able to interact with human agents conversationally. You can ask questions, many of which will be answered in seconds. Syntactically this chatbot writes like a pro: its sentences are usually well-structured and grammatically correct. The tone of its writing sounds – for the most part – professional, courteous, and well-polished. Often, the answers generated sound legitimate: it feels like ChatGPT knows what it’s talking about!  

But is this AI ethical? Can it be used responsibly? What harm might it generate? CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE TO READ FULL ARTICLE

I've been trying to keep up with this space, but it changes so fast!  Beware: GPT-4 will be released in the next  3 to 6 months and people are saying that it will be SUBSTANTIALLY better.  This is just the beginning.    

Very briefly, these are a few headline points that I've garnered from a variety of different sources: 

1. Faculty could go to the [chatGPT] website and enter their take-home exam or essay questions to familiarize themselves on the type of answers they receive back which can help determine how easily it can return answers and the quality of the answers.  
2. Talk to students about it instead of pretending it does not exist.  And talk to them about your expectations and do's and don'ts.  This is to make sure they are aware of any rules you have.
3. Possible methods to counteract the technology: 
   • The more specific the question, the harder for the AI to generate meaningful responses.  
   • As Peter Bedford said, requiring citations (but keep an eye on the citations, as I've read articles in which it can also return citations.  But it often makes up the citations out of thin air!  There is no such journal article, but it makes it look like there is)  
   • It has trouble with questions with pictures and graphs, etc. [Might help with art history or economics, etc]
   • Consider in-class exams, oral exams or assessment where progress is tracked over time and multiple assignments (sort of like WAC classes in which writing assignments build on the prior ones).  [This requires a larger overhaul of the course]
   • It is trained on information before 2021, so it will have a weaker response to more recent events.  This could change quickly, however. 
4. Possible methods to incorporate the technology: Plug your essay questions into ChatGPT, get a result from it and then give the result to students.  Then: 
   • ask students to annotate the ChatGPT essay with their thoughts on its strengths/weaknesses.  
   • ask student to "correct" the essay for errors, or to interpret the essay.
   • ask students to write a rebuttal (if argumentative in nature), or expand upon the various thoughts in the essay.

These methods will focus students on critical thinking.  

[WARNING: students could potentially plug some of these back into ChatGPT, so you may have to check this also]

I'm less familiar if these methods will work in quantitative work or coding in CS, but I've heard some of them can work.  

Hope some of this helps for Winter term at least!   If GPT-4 is released in Spring term, this may need to be reworked.  I'm guessing that educators will eventually have to move towards the "incorporate the technology," but this will be controversial. IMO, it is going to transform education and for the better after a period of adjustment.  But, just my opinion and too complex to explain here.  

Joe Johnson has provided the Union Community with a January 30, 2023 statement from the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum* (AWAC) Executive Committee on Artificial Intelligence Writing Tools in Writing Across the Curriculum Settings.

For over a decade, researchers and entrepreneurs have been developing Artificial Intelligence text generators. In recent years, tools such as OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3 or Chat GPT have become sophisticated enough to produce texts that some readers find difficult to distinguish from texts produced by human writers. This development raises practical, pedagogical, and ethical concerns, including in academic settings.

A fundamental tenet of Writing Across the Curriculum is that writing is a mode of learning. Students develop understanding and insights through the act of writing. Rather than writing simply being a matter of presenting existing information or furnishing products for the purpose of testing or grading, writing is a fundamental means to create deep learning and foster cognitive development. Learning to write within a field or major is also one of the most critical ways that emerging scholars and professionals become enculturated in a discourse community. We are concerned that relying on AI text generators limits student learning and enculturation.

Our Position

As scholars in the discipline of writing studies more fully explore the practical and ethical implications of AI language generators in classroom and other settings, we underscore this: Writing to learn is an intellectual activity that is crucial to the cognitive and social development of learners and writers. This vital activity cannot be replaced by AI language generators. 

That said, we understand that institutions, departments, and faculty will have to decide locally what role AI text generators should play in their situations. Some learning communities might reject these technologies outright, including them, for example, in campus policies about plagiarism. Other communities might find productive pedagogical roles for this technology; indeed, some writing teachers are having students explore and experiment, in a critical fashion, with AI writing: its potential for aspects of the writing process, its limitations, its ethics, its costs.

Furthermore, in some professional fields, AI tools have been available for years, and professors in those fields have incorporated attention to them in teaching.

Context, Past and Future

The history of writing is marked by changes in technologies that have shaped how people write and what writing can accomplish: from clay tablets to papyrus, quill pens to pencils, handwriting to typing to texting, words to image to design to multimodality, physical library to the world wide web. On one hand, AI text generators are yet another technology with potential uses in various invention, drafting, and editing processes. On the other hand, their potential autonomy from human writers makes them qualitatively different from previous technologies.

While exclusively having AIs generate writing does not engage students in an essential mode of learning, it is also clear that writing scholars and WAC faculty should explore whether–and, if so, how–AI text generation tools might be integrated into writing pedagogy. The WAC Clearinghouse hosts a page of useful resources: AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing: Starting Points for Inquiry. We might pose these research questions: Might the acts of critiquing, rewriting, or discussing AI-generated text foster growth? Are there scenarios where student writing might productively be complemented, supplemented, or assisted by AI language generators?  Can this happen in ways that do not preempt student learning? 

It is premature to provide answers to such questions, which need thoughtful investigation. We look forward to that research. 

Reaffirming Best Practices

Current AI discussions remind us, yet again, of long-established best practices in Writing Across the Curriculum, grounded in research and extant for decades: designing meaningful and specific assignments that foster learning and develop skills; focusing on processes and practices such as peer-response and revision; encouraging writing in multiple genres, including ones connected to specific disciplinary practices.

We recommend fostering the kind of deep learning and cognitive development that students gain through writing to learn and through learning to write in specific situations.                                        

*About AWAC and this Document

The Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC) is an international organization that brings together the intellectual, human, political, and economic capital of the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) community to grow WAC as a global intellectual and pedagogical movement. AWAC promotes initiatives that support students’ writing across their academic careers, faculty development related to student writing and writing pedagogy, and research into writing across domains (e.g. disciplines, professions, communities, and academic levels) and transnationally.

Joining the Executive Committee (Doug Hesse, Justin Rademaekers, Ann Blakeslee, Laurie Britt-Smith, Karen Moroski-Rigney, Sherri Craig, and Paula Roskinksi) in drafting this statement was Stacey Sheriff. We sent a draft version to AWAC members in mid-January, and their thoughtful comments informed revisions.  Contact: Doug Hesse, AWAC Chair, at dhesse@du.edu.