AI And Academia: How ChatGPT Can Come To Teachers’ Aid Despite Downsides

ChatGPT can automate student assignments and exam grading, thereby leaving academicians with more free time to focus on other tasks.

Technological advancements, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), have begun to have an impact in all spheres of life and so is academia affected in a variety of ways in recent years. Our government, too, has recognised the relevance and importance of AI in academia. One of the fundamental principles of the New Education Policy, 2020, is the extensive use of technology in teaching and learning, the removal of language barriers, increased access for all students, and educational planning and management. It also proposes setting up of National Educational Technology Forum (NETF) for extensive research both on the technological as well as educational fronts of Artificial Intelligence to enhance learning, assessment, planning, administration, and so on, both for school and higher education.

Chatbots powered by AI have been a part of the technological landscape for decades, but it wasn't until natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) came of age. 

Microsoft's Tay and Meta's Replika were two early examples of not-so-famous chatbots. OpenAI's ChatGPT, on the other hand, has gained prominence and is far more advanced than its predecessors. 

How Does ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT makes use of OpenAI's GPT-3 language model, which can generate human-like text and sentiment analysis on prompting. 

Google’s Bard is still an experimental conversational AI service and is in the trial stage only. Microsoft’s Bing has already been integrated with GPT-4 to not only provide search, but answers, chat as well as content creation services.

To run ChatGPT, OpenAI uses Microsoft's Azure platform. It provides the computing infrastructure (including scalable computing resources, storage, and other ancillary services) and resources required to process the large amounts of data needed to train and maintain the model. When OpenAI was newly established, Microsoft funded it way back in 2019, then in 2021, followed by the recent announcement of its third phase of funding in early 2023. 

OpenAI uses the pre-existing azure platform of Microsoft for its computing infrastructural needs and enhanced AI capabilities, strengthening the Azure platform.

How Can ChatGPT Help Academicians?

ChatGPT has the potential to impact the way academia operates in a major way. On the positive side, ChatGPT can automate student assignments and exam grading, thereby leaving academicians with more free time to focus on other tasks. 

ChatGPT or any of its further advanced models can be suitably used for creating a starting point for lectures, assignments, software coding, presentations, and drafts to begin with. 

It can surely help students in planning the draft structure, formats, emails, and basic information to begin with. It can connect researchers with relevant sources, like the way in which Bing is being used for prompting searches. 

Downsides Of ChatGPT

One important thing that has to be kept in mind is that it is not designed to go into the continued conversation as it confuses the system itself, leading to the delivery of wrong information. 

As researchers and educators, we will have to be better in promoting skills to get the best possible answer, and in case it is not achieved one has to edit the previous prompt and submit the request. With every passing time, as the number of prompts increases through users, the system will evolve and become better in its response.

However, every convenience comes at a price and so does ChatGPT with its downsides. One of the most concerning aspects of using ChatGPT is its potential in homogenizing knowledge and ideas as students and faculties become dependent on it for thought-provoking ideas. 

As the tool is trained on a vast corpus of text data, it may not be able to thoughtfully capture the ever-evolving nuances and complexities of humans of all demographics. 

This can lead to a lack of diversity and originality in the academic field, stifling innovation and progress. It needs not provide factually correct information all the time, thus complete reliance without cross-checking is not always an advisable option. 

There have been instances when it has provided even made-up or wrong citations for the prompted research text. It is important to note that ChatGPT is based on the data it has been trained on, so any biases present in that data will be reflected in the tool's output. 

There are further concerns regarding user data safety norms which become concerning the fact that we are still in process of achieving a robust user data privacy law in the country.

The Way Ahead

Despite various challenges and benefits, the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other AI systems is inevitable. The first major social challenge of ChatGPT is the need to understand it better and agencies like National Educational Technology Forum (NETF) in close coordination with researchers and academicians can play a vital role.

These academic insights will help allay anxiety among individuals and organisations who could benefit from adopting and gaining the first mover's advantage. 

Currently, so much discourse without relevant research is leading to organisations, primarily academic institutions restricting the use of ChatGPT for its students, research staff and faculties, which will create a long-term roadblock in reskilling the existing and new labour force. 

Academia is an important sector that helps to shape society's future. With the global economy's changing demands and the rapid pace of technological change, the demand for highly educated and skilled individuals has never been greater. 

Academia is critical in meeting these demands by providing the necessary education and training. While education will be critical in the transformation of our nation, technological advancement is a necessity in improving educational processes and outcomes, making both interdependent on each other.

(The author is a Science Technology & Society (STS) Scholar with research focus on Digital Democracy and Exclusion Studies.  Currently, he is working as Senior Manager - Training at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Indian School of Business)

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