SOUTH JERSEY (KYW Newsradio) — ChatGPT, a newly popular artificial intelligence chatbot program, can certainly help lazy students cut corners and cheat. The program can quickly produce completely plausible and often accurate school papers.
There have been already reports of human jobs being replaced by it, and it apparently passed the MBA exam at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business.
But if ChatGPT can pass advanced college exams, maybe it’s time to think about changing the way we test students, argued Rutgers University–Camden associate English professor Jim Brown.
“The fact that we’ve all gone to the question of cheating and spend so much energy on it says a lot about how we think about teaching and learning,” he said. “I think there are a million other ways to be thinking of these new tools, which are just going to keep emerging.”
Brown studies how new technologies impact academics. He said ChatGPT can be used as a tool, like a calculator — a device that didn’t ruin mathematics education.
“Some of its abilities are pretty surprising and staggering, in particular, if you learn what it does well,” he said, like writing summaries or computer code.
Experts are just scratching the surface of how best to utilize it.
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Sean, who asked that his last name not be used, said ChatGPT saves him time building tables of data for his job at a major tech company in the area.
“Create this many columns and this much information and here’s the inputs and have it spit the information back to you,” he explained. “Tools like this are going to provide people opportunities to say, hey, this is what I would like to accomplish and provide proper explanations to this solution and have it generate information back to them.”
The downside of AI is certainly worth considering, but the best move forward is to keep developing it, with humans building necessary guardrails. As long as this remains a tool to achieve goals with human guidance, both agree the possibilities are endless.
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