The Pros and Cons of ChatGPT in Higher Education

Patty Patria, Chief Information Officer, Babson College

Patty Patria, Chief Information Officer, Babson College

Whether you like technology or not, ChatGPT and artificial intelligence have become hot topics in college campuses as of late. Although artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) were introduced in the 1950s, they did not become mainstream until the last decade when businesses started to leverage these tools for complex technical solutions like personalization, automation and predictive analytics. In order to leverage AI and ML when it first began, you had to have a strong background in math, statistics and programming, which only a subset of the population had.

Enter November of 2022, when ChatGPT3 was introduced to the general public. Although ChatGPT leverages AI and ML for deep learning, end users don’t need any of the complex math or programming skills to leverage it. Instead, they can type in language-based questions, and get answers quickly and easily. In the period of just a few months, ChatGPT has amassed more than 100 million users in part due to its ease of use.

There are both pros and cons to leveraging ChatGPT in the classroom, which is causing great debates in higher education. On the positive side, ChatGPT can become an assistant to students, by answering basic or complex questions on a variety of topics; it can be used as a writing tool, helping to generate ideas or provide suggestions; it can also be used as a tutor, helping students struggling with a topic by providing explanations and examples. For more advanced classes, like programming, instructors can build ChatGPT into course assignments, by having students build chatbots or working on natural language processing projects. In addition, ChatGPT can also be used for sentiment analysis projects, which leverages natural language processing techniques used to identify and extract the emotions or attitudes expressed in text data. This type of analysis is particularly popular with businesses for marketing analysis trends, brand or reputation monitoring, and customer feedback analysis.

“Although artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) were introduced in the 1950s, they did not become mainstream until the last decade when businesses started to leverage these tools for complex technical solutions like personalization, automation and predictive analytics.”

Although there is a plethora of positive uses for ChatGPT in the classroom, there are also concerns. One of the several concerns is academic dishonesty, where students might just copy and paste answers from ChatGPT and try to pass it off as their own work for writing assignments. There are also ethics and bias concerns. Like any AI model, ChatGPT has the potential to be biased, based on the data it was trained on. When incorporated into classroom environments, educators should make sure the tool is not perpetuating stereotypes or discriminatory behavior.

And, most importantly, the more we rely on technology, the more we come to depend on it. Although ChatGPT can help reduce time spent on tasks, it is important to ensure that students are still developing fundamental skills and knowledge, rather than solely relying on AI-generated answers.

In addition to the issues mentioned above, there are regulations looming on the horizon. Similar to what they did with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union (EU) is leading the way again with the EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. This proposed EU AI Act, which was introduced in April of 2021 and is expected to go into effect later this year, will introduce a common regulatory framework around the use of AI in organizations. Similar to GDPR, organizations will have to understand the impact of this regulation on their operations, which will likely prohibit the use of AI on highly restricted data, and ensure organizations are in compliance with this regulation by going through a routine National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI assessment.

In addition to the EU, California and several other states are also looking at AI legislation. The proposed California legislation introduces new protections of when AI can be used to make consequential decisions. These include situations like whether a worker receives a bonus, a student gets into college, or a senior receives their public benefits^[i].

Although AI tools like ChatGPT have potential to make life easier for students and employees, there are definite concerns that still need to be analyzed. Hopefully, we will see more colleges and universities adding AI and tools like ChatGPT to ethics courses down the road, so we can perform more formal research on impact and become better educated on use cases.