The rise of A.I chatbots was destined to come eventually, and it has started to develop faster throughout the years. A.I chatbots are designed in a way to have human-like conversations to help a person or a customer with any questions. For the most part, these A.I chatbots have the answers and help for the user right away.  

 A.I. chatbots have developed so much over the years that now they are beginning to affect higher education. These new A.I. chatbots have developed so much that people rely on them to do their work. 

 In the article  “Is ChatGPT a threat to education?” the author, Iqbal Pittalwala, writes about the University of California, Riverside professors and their expert opinions on this newly developed A.I. system. 

According to news.ucr.edu, ChatGPT, specifically, is the newest threat to higher education because this A.I. system generates text and can even write essays. This is a huge problem for colleges and universities.  

Professors are worried because most know nothing about this, and it’s very hard for the professors to do something about it. This new chatbot is not like the others as it is able to write entire essays– just by inputting key subjects on what your paper should be about.  

Yue Dong, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at UC, has given his opinions on the newly developed chatbot. Dong said that this new A.I. system has the ability of paraphrasing, text summarization, machine translation and question-answering. 

 “The ChatGPT platform has a wide range of applications related to text generation, outputs should be evaluated critically and used with caution,” Dong said in the article.  

Dong is trying to warn people and even students of these chatbots. You have to be careful using this new A.I. chatbot because it may not always be accurate. When a college student is writing a paper, this may not look good.  

Morris Maduro, a biology professor at UC, understands the threats of  ChatGPT and has some thoughts on what to do about it.  

“If students can avoid real learning and get high grades on homework assignments by using it, instructors will need to either make assessments ’ChatGPT-proof” or find ways to incorporate ChatGPT in helping students to build new skills,” Maduro told Pittalwala.  

 Professors are becoming increasingly aware of these new chatbots helping students with essays and homework assignments. The big problem of this threat is that professors will not be able to decipher real work from ChatGPT work, unless there is some sort of factual error in the essay.  

 This newly developed chatbot is going to take away from student’s learning because, in the end, they are just asking a question to this new chatbot and getting all the answers. These chatbots can be a huge threat to higher education especially since it’s hard to figure out a way around it.  

Sources: 

Rise of the Chatbot: How A.I. is Revolutionising Customer Service – Digital Skills Global 

Is ChatGPT a threat to education? | News (ucr.edu)