ChatGPT has thrown higher education into tumult. Universities were already using artificial intelligence technology for their own daily business: to remind students to pay off tuition balances, to answer questions about campus life, or even to check students’ work for plagiarism. But ChatGPT, an AI chatbot released to the general public last November, has turned the tables. Now a student can recruit it to generate a passable paper on just about any topic in seconds. Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s fiction? No problem. The heroic code in “Beowulf”? Done. The potential for cheating becomes immense.
Some universities, like Sciences Po in France, have banned ChatGPT for classwork, unless students have permission from instructors. Open Universities of Australia has offered students guidelines for using ChatGPT ethically. The University of Toronto advises instructors to specify which digital tools are allowed for assignments but warns the instructors against using unapproved AI tools to evaluate student work. Perhaps they read the tweets joking that teachers will soon use AI to come up with assignments, students will use AI to do them, and AI will grade the result—at which point everyone can leave education to the bots and go for coffee.
