ChatGPT and academia: a new study for a controversial relationship

ChatGPT has the potential to create increasing and exciting opportunities – but also poses significant challenges – for the academic community, according to a study written in large part using the software.

Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is the latest chatbot and artificial intelligence (AI) platform touted as having the potential to revolutionize research and education. However, as it becomes ever more advanced, the technology has also prompted concerns across the education sector about academic honesty and plagiarism.

To address some of these, the new study out of the University of Plymouth uses ChatGPT to demonstrate how sophisticated Large Language Machines (LLMs) have become and the steps that can be taken to ensure their influence remains a positive one. The University, along with Marjon University Plymouth, talked about the paper in a press release.

Behold Bard – Google’s AI chatbot rival to ChatGPT

Google unveils Bard, their AI chatbot designed to challenge the popular ChatGPT. Public access is now available for users in the US and UK, but integration into Google’s search engine is yet to be implemented.

The study

For the majority of the paper, they used a series of prompts and questions to encourage ChatGPT to produce content in an academic style. These included:

• Write an original academic paper, with references, describing the implications of GPT-3 for assessment in higher education;
• How can academics prevent students from plagiarising using GPT-3?
• Are there any technologies that will check if work has been written by a chatbot?
• Produce several witty and intelligent titles for an academic research paper on the challenges universities face in ChatGPT and plagiarism.

Once the text was generated, they copied and pasted the output into the manuscript, ordered it broadly following the structure suggested by ChatGPT, and then inserted genuine references throughout. This process was only revealed to readers in the paper’s discussion section, written directly by the researchers without the software’s input. In that section, the study’s authors highlight that the text produced by ChatGPT – while much more sophisticated than previous innovations in this area – can be relatively formulaic and that several existing AI-detection tools would pick up on that.

However, they say their findings should serve as a wake-up call to university staff to think very carefully about the design of their assessments and ways to ensure that academic dishonesty is clearly explained to students and minimized.

ChatGPT is great, just not at chess

ChatGPT  is all the rage right now. So much so that we seem to forget what it actually is: a language model. And that means it isn’t suited for all kinds of tasks that other machines are already capable of. Like playing chess, for one thing.

A need for long-term solutions

Professor Debby Cotton from Plymouth University, the study’s lead author, commented: “This latest AI development brings huge challenges for universities, not least in testing student knowledge and teaching writing skills – but looking positively, it is an opportunity for us to rethink what we want students to learn and why. I’d like to think that AI would enable us to automate some of the more administrative tasks academics do, allowing more time to be spent working with students”

In this regard, Dr. Peter Cotton, Associate Professor in Ecology at the University of Plymouth, believes that banning ChatGPT can only constitute a short-term solution while developing ideas on how to properly address the issues. AI is already widely accessible to students outside their institutions, with companies like Microsoft and Google rapidly incorporating it into search engines and Office suites in the professional world. Dr. Cotton believes that “the chat is already out of the bag,” and the imminent challenge for universities will be to adapt to a system where AI is the expected norm.

Lastly, Dr. Reuben. Shipway, lecturer in Marine Biology at Plymouth, said: “With any new revolutionary technology – and this is a revolutionary technology – there will be winners and losers. The losers will be those that fail to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. The winners will take a pragmatic approach and leverage this technology to their advantage.”