Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT has only been available for about 3 months now. Yet, it is causing a tremendous amount of discussion across the world. I am sure you have heard of it and may have even played with it. Perhaps some of you or your friends have used it to complete an assignment. However, what do you know about ChatGPT and how it was created? How do you know you can trust what it provides to you?
Without that understanding and knowledge, you cannot do well or even know how to get started in any task. The same is true of the tools you use, and ChatGPT is no exception.
Let's use the example of Wikipedia. Ever since Wikipedia was first launched, we have discovered that by being open source, anyone with any knowledge or lack thereof can write articles for it that others may assume were written by experts, yet we know nothing could be farther from the truth. Steven Pruitt, has made at least one edit to 33% of all English-language Wikipedia articles and has created more than 35,000 Wikipedia articles. Pruitt’s full-time job is working in records and information at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service. Learn more here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meet-the-man-behind-a-third-of-whats-on-wikipedia/. A five-yr-old could have written that article on dinosaurs. An incredibly racist person may have written that article on race relations. A Russian government agent may have written that article on U.S.-Soviet/Russian relations. These have all happened. I will use Wikipedia from time to time, but as a professional scientist with 40 yrs of experience, I am fully capable of recognizing quality vs. crap.
So, before you launch headfirst into using Chat GPT, do your research and understand how it was created and on what it was trained (the first release was trained on 570GB of text data from the Web – books, articles, websites, and social media). Definitely read OpenAI’s information, but since they are the creator of ChatGPT, read other reliable sources, too. Here is a good article by Will Douglas Heaven in MIT Technology Review (8 Feb 2023): https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/08/1068068/chatgpt-is-everywhere-heres-where-it-came-from/.
The gist of my post here is the excellent caution provided by Anna Mills, an English instructor at the College of Marin, from this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 6 March 2023.
Academics should also consider the ways that generative AI can pose risks to some students.
On the one hand, these programs can serve as free and easy-to-use study guides and research tools, or help non-native speakers fix writing mistakes. On the other hand, struggling students may fall back on what it produces rather than using their own voice and skill. Mills says that she’s fallen into that trap herself: auto-generating text which at first glance seems pretty good. “Then later, when I go back and look at it, I realize that it’s not sound,” she says. “But on first glance because it’s so fluent and authoritative, even I had thought, okay, yeah, that’s decent.”
Mills, who provided feedback to OpenAI — which developed ChatGPT — on its guidance for educators, notes that the organization cautions that users need quite a bit of expertise to verify its recommendations. “So the student who is using it because they lack the expertise,” she says, “is exactly the student who is not ready to assess what it’s doing critically.”
Bottom line: be an educated user of ChatGPT and all tech. And if you do use its results, fully cite it as your source!
