What is ChatGPTs impact on students in Higher Learning?

 

Asked this Question to ChatGPT:

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what is ChatGPTs impact on students in higher learning

ChatGPT is a language model that can be used to assist students in a variety of ways, such as helping them to understand and analyze text, generate written responses to prompts, and perform research. However, the specific impact of ChatGPT on students in higher learning would depend on how it is being used in a given educational setting. It's important to note that while ChatGPT can be a helpful tool, it is not a substitute for human instruction and should be used in conjunction with other resources and teaching methods.

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 Couple interesting facts: (From Google)

• If several people ask ChatGPT exactly the same question, it will generate nearly the same answer for each of them. So, if you're a teacher and you're correcting several assignments that have the same construction or the same examples or reasoning, then it might be a text generated by AI.
• If the text has high complexity, it's more likely to be human-written. The lower the perplexity, the more likely it's AI-generated. Burstiness compares the variation of sentences. Humans tend to write longer or more complex sentences and shorter ones, causing spikes in perplexity in human writing.

So, interesting way of finding Perplexity and Burstiness.  What I like to call meter after my years in band, My musical teacher would bring in a metronome and use it to count out a 4 4 rhythm and he'd use that to keep time for us.  It allowed us to keep together and start each stanza together.  The meter of a sentence is basically how it flows.  Where a computer generated text reads with 4 4 rhythm, sentences generally the same length and approximately the same complexity.  At least what I've seen so far.  I'm sure it'll change over time.  However, having seen several examples now, I can spot it pretty quickly.  I've read through some of my "peers" posts and discussion prompts and can see when a post has been AI generated.  I'm fairly certain my professors can as well.  Has it been used?  Great Question!

 

Through a tool that I found called GPTZero. I've ran some of my own documents and stuff generated by ChatGPT through it and found a significant difference 10x times the difference between my text and something generated by ChatGPT.  The meter was off.

ChatGPT is such a huge topic in the educational realm now it's going to be interesting how this plays out.  On one hand using it as a tool, and on the other hand how to control plagiarism.  Students asking a question and cut and pasting it into canvas or some other school platform and claiming that work as their own.  Two big problems I see

• It's not your Work.
• The student is bypassing the whole learning process

Not using critical thinking to compose your own thoughts into an essay question, is akin to cheating.  I'm not sure the whole plagiarism argument fits, because it's not exactly stealing somebody else's words, however it is cheating.  It bypasses the whole process of learning how to dissect a question.  Formulate thoughts on the subject and regurgitate that information back into a readable form for submission to answer a question put forth by a teacher.  Cut and paste?  What do you learn from that?

I have to admit it's tempting to just let the computer generate my response.  However I know that doing that only makes me the looser.

On the business side...  Wow, Google and Microsoft are shaking in their boots.  Google is so worried about this, I personally think it has a lot to do with the 12,000 people they laid off this week.  They claim they over-hired during the good times of Covid.  However knowing many people in that bunch.  I can guarantee they've been looking ahead and have seen the writing on the wall.  They are in for a few years of hard catch-up.  I've heard they have brought back the founding members of Google to help them combat this threat.

 

Microsoft has taken the tack that if you cannot beat them join them.  Pouring 10 Billion.  Yes that's the correct number I've read into the openai pre-ipo.  Angel investing?  Not sure that really fits.  What I see is a Bing / openai API that they push the question typed into the browser into the API which spits out a block of text that they push to the top of the screen before they list all the links pertinent to the question.  Kind of like what I've seen google do when you put a noun into google.  Putting a noun into google gives you a definition of the word.

 

Putting in something like Square Feet gives you a formula or definition and then links about the topic.  That's probably the format that we'll see all of google and Bing go to in the near future.  The first paragraph is most likely NOT generated by AI today, because its probably just a standard query, however in the future I imagine it'll be AI generated

Anyway 10 Billion into openai by Microsoft.  Going to be big when you start putting Billion after the number.  What are they doing?  Buying part of the market away from Google.  Google of course is so sure of themselves that they are writing their own, and hope to have something released this year 2023.  Arrogance?  Dunno.  Makes me think back to the regime shift for SDN.  Software defined networking.  Which I've written about on other blogs back in 2003 or 2004 and will probably write something more current in the coming months.  Google basically built their own switch.  (Gotta tie it into networking somehow.  I'm a network geek you know).  Anyway with Googles entry into developing "White Box" switches, they really changed the whole market for switches.  They were fairly successful, but they where the 800  pound Ape, and had the ability to control which way the market went.  Not sure they have that luxury today.  I guess we'll see.