UCL Releases ChatGPT Guidelines for Students
With AI technologies, and particularly ChatGPT, facing a surge in popularity in the last few months, questions of how university students can make use of such technology while also respecting academic integrity have become very prominent.
Chat GPT, or rather, Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, is an Artificial Intelligence tool that can generate information in the form of conversation. It can understand the questions it is asked and provide responses, while also being able to answer follow-up questions and provide personalised information to its users. However, Universities have been worried that this may tempt students to commit academic misconduct and lead them to plagiarisation in their work.
The truth is that the dangers and concerns of plagiarisation have been there way before the existence of this technology, and academic misconduct has been something that has long worried universities. This has lead them to realise that by simply banning its use, universities would be denying the benefits such an innovative tool can provide to their students simply because of such fears. Therefore, the decision of UCL to release guidelines for students on how to effectively use such technology to complement their studies was considered by many specialists as a step in the right direction.
The briefing released by UCL, titled “Engaging with AI in your education and assessment” aims to help students understand the most effective ways to use ChatGPT and other AI technologies alongside their studies within academic grounds. It recognises the benefits of such technology, such as answering students’ questions or providing them with ideas for their work, while also addressing some of its limitations, such as limits on the level of information it can provide in more niche subject areas.
The reality is, that if used correctly, ChatGPT and AI technology in general, can be used to help students advance their studies as long as they do not use such technology to commit academic misconduct. Its ability to answer queries while remembering the topic of conversation allows students to ask questions about parts of their course they might have difficulty in understanding, and comprehend the responses better while having the ability to follow up if they don’t understand the answer. Additionally, its ability to recognise and understand the context of a user’s input while personalising the responses it generates through the use of NPL (Natural Language Processing) algorithms allows its technology to tailor each student’s experience based on their individual needs. Notably, academic misconduct can be easily detected through plagiarism checkers such as Turnitin, so even if it were to be committed, universities
would be able to know and hold the students accountable for their actions.This is one of the main reasons that universities decided not to overlook the benefits provided by AI technology such as ChatGPT and inform their students about how to effectively use them while avoiding the danger of academic misconduct.
Overall, it can be seen that Chat GPT and other AI technologies can be very beneficial for the use of higher education students, and UCL’s idea to release a guide on the use of such technology was the right thing to do, as adapting to the evolvement of technology and guiding their students on how to correctly and ethically use it to complement their studies is the best way universities can help their students advance and monitor the use of such tools.