The infamous conflict between STEM and humanities majors may have to be put aside indefinitely, as the development of technology-driven innovations such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly sentient and more reliant on philosophers, policy makers, and other “thinkers” to navigate the challenging realm of ethics. As AI becomes more integrated in our daily lives, the advancement of such technology will require much more debate on what boundaries should be implemented to facilitate the merging of AI and society.
One example of the rise of AI is ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a chatbot launched by startup OpenAI designed to interact with users. The bot’s capabilities range from writing papers to drafting songs, creating recipes, penning poems, and even fixing software code. Within five days of its launch, more than a million people were using it. Its user-friendly style has garnered praise from students, educators, and leading AI researchers. The service’s key feature of being able to generate human-like responses allows it to be useful in many situations, such as customer service, therapy sessions, and online forums. Users can ask for help on homework, chat to combat loneliness, and even play games.
Yet others are more than wary of the bot’s potential. Many professors, such as Professor Christian Terwiesch at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, cite concerns over how well the bot could answer test questions and analyze prompts. In fact, Professor Terwiesch proctored the bot while it took one of the assessments in his MBA course Operations Management.
Surprisingly, the bot scored a solid B on the exam, further prompting Terwiesch—as well as many other professors across the country—to worry about students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments. As a result, educators fear that these types of programs may reduce the value of a degree (and education in general).
Here at AU, similar concerns could be ignited. For a small campus such as Andrews and college institutions overall, AI could challenge academic integrity. A few clicks and one prompt can make the bot spit out an essay for a literature class or solve a math problem all for a less-than-motivated student. But administrators may not have to fear yet – I tried to test ChatGPT for myself, and the bot’s overnight rise-to-fame has maxed out its capacity for days now. While it seems powerful in theory, OpenAI is still trying to work out the kinks, such as server connections.
Besides the risk the chatbot poses to academia, researchers are anxious about the chatbot’s analytical framework. According to AI researcher Timnit Gebru, ChatGPT learned how to write by examining “millions of pieces of writing on the Internet” —but not everything published on the Internet is accurate. The bot encounters difficulties when trying to discern between fiction and fact. What exacerbates that is the fact that the bot writes eloquently and authoritatively, so even if what is writing about is completely false (take, for example, the bot writing that Hillary Clinton was the first female president of the United States), it sounds confident and convincing. Further than that is the issue of individuals with malicious intent utilizing the bot to spread misinformation on purpose.
Despite these growing concerns, ChatGPT is harnessing more support from powerhouse software companies like Microsoft, which has been investing over $10 billion into OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT. Regardless of the controversy, AI is here to stay. In fact, ChatGPT is already the buzz on news outlets and social media, as seen here by this TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRsem2MH/. As the debate continues on what AI’s place is in society—if it has any at all—the general public and sophisticated researchers alike should seek to preserve knowledge and the human being’s remarkable capability to think for itself while inquiring further about how such technology can be applied in a safe and beneficial manner.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.