Its seems that there is no end to the hysteria erupting from the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.
While some have celebrated this as a grand leveller, giving access to information and analytical tools to everybody, others are decrying it for the massive impact it will have on educational ethics and responsibility.
It is easy to see why. Chat bots such as ChatGPT and others like Bard and Jasper are now capable of writing on command: they can write everything from a mundane email to a college essay, and even pass Law school exams.
In educational circuits, this is enough to create panic. What is to stop college students from using AI tools to write their essays?
Universities are using a range of tactics to handle this explosive new technology, barely keeping up in their policies to contain the possibilities of AI which grow every day. Some have placed total bans on the use of such tools, falling back to traditional pen and paper exams.
Other institutions have focused on increasing funding for detecting use of AI tools in student work. This is a cat and mouse game, as universities play catch up to all the applications which are available, mostly free.
More than that, there is a fear that this will only make students focus on trying not to be detected: “My concern is that students will spend more time attempting to circumvent the system than learning the content,” says Alex Sims in the journal ‘Times Higher Education’.
Both of these extreme options are unnecessary and knee jerk reactions, at best. Most research on what these chat bots are creating is seen to be too general, generic and even false. The references and citations given are often wrong.
But that is not even the point. AI is here to stay and universities will need to find ways of living, and even leveraging it for their own needs.
Encouraging students to begin to use such tools will make them more comfortable and less as if they are doing something wrong. Training students to actually use AI tools correctly will help both, teachers and students. After all, the role of higher education is to make learners cope with the challenges of the world outside the university. Increasingly, this world is driven by technology.
For professors, AI tools have been seen to save time in terms of data entry or correcting a large number of papers which have an identical pattern. It also allows for personalised teaching, as it is now possible to discover gaps in knowledge or skills among specific learners.
Most importantly, using such tools will remind students, and teachers, that knowledge on its own means nothing if other factors like context, making connections, or analysing specific frameworks are absent.
AI tools are not going anywhere. If anything, they are getting bigger and more efficient. Universities should learn, not only to live with them but to maximise their efficiency.
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