KUCHING: ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is known to have taken the world by storm in just five days, with people using it for various reasons — for assignments, proofreading, generating ideas, and many more.
All the more, the understanding of how and when to utilise it for a good purpose is essential, especially for students — if not it will be a headache to many teachers, lecturers, and even students in the future.
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) senior lecturer from the Faculty of Education, Language, and Communications, Chuah Kee Man expressed concern with the usage of ChatGPT among students.
“The concern for any tool is abuse or misuse, and what ChatGPT has created is easy access to allow students to create the habit of copying and pasting.
“What this means is that students won’t have to look through five to ten different articles, dig deeper and select which part they want to use for their assignment with just a simple prompt, ChatGPT can generate it all,” he expressed.
Chuah stated that an ever-concerning issue with the usage of ChatGPT is the lack of thinking among students.
“On one hand, it is good to use ChatGPT to create a draft or generate ideas, but once students don’t think about it and copy and paste blindly into their assignment, that’s the dangerous part.
“I always share with my students this: Why do you need to use AI (artificial intelligence), when your intelligence is already there?” he stressed.
He further added that this concern is a catalyst for more serious concerns.
“Once you have a lack of thinking, the habit of copying and pasting, cheating, and plagiarising is going to be even more serious,” he emphasised during the ‘From Convenience to Crisis: Unpacking Public Dependency on Artificial Intelligence Generator-ChatGPT’ seminar at UNIMAS recently.
In the opposite spectrum of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), UNIMAS Pre-University Lecturer Centre of Pre-University Studies, Ahmad Alif Kamal said that with the creation of artificial intelligence, the understanding of mathematics or computer science is no longer required to start a programme.
“Back then, students need to learn all basic mathematics, then deeper into more specific mathematics, then only studying computer science.
“After the creation of artificial intelligence, mathematics, computer science, data science, are all abandoned because with just a few clicks and types in the artificial intelligence application and another in ChatGPT, a full-running programme with an AI on its own,” he explained.
Therefore, Chuah and Kamal mentioned that regulation of artificial intelligence systems, such as ChatGPT, is important.
“I agree that proper regulation of AI tools is necessary because in 2023 we have entered into generative AI where a person’s face can be generated into a video of the person speaking a fluent language, what more to say of what generative AI can do in the future?” Chuah stressed.
Kamal added that the first regulation that should be included is the incorporation of this artificial intelligence in education wisely, instead of completely rejecting it.
“How are we going to solve problems with our own head, creative, and critical thinking?
So, this is when education and academia need to be creative, but not going overboard; for example, more personally curated problem-solving questions need to be asked more realistic and grounded solutions where they need to think and not rely on ChatGPT,” he added.
At this point where artificial intelligence has yet to be regulated, Chuah advises students to follow two As—accountability and acknowledgment.
“Be accountable and cite even when using ChatGPT in assignments, and don’t overuse or over-rely on it.
“One thing I always encourage my students is to utilise the free ChatGPT for proofreading—just by prompting ChatGPT and letting it know that you are sending the text part by part and asking it to bolden the words that have changed,” he advised.
Kamal encouraged students to use ChatGPT with topics that are harder to understand.
“Stop ‘ChatGPT-ing’ and start learning.
“If you listen in class, but still don’t understand, ask ChatGPT to explain that topic to an eight-year-old, and from them learn,” he encouraged.
ChatGPT, a form of generative AI, is a model that interacts conversationally by answering follow-up questions, admitting to mistakes, challenging incorrect thinking, and rejecting inappropriate instructions.
