Assuming I have not complete lost you at this point, there are a couple of clues in the above text that might help you to understand the concerns. The Professional Qualifications that IIMS delivers by distance learning are assignment based. Let’s assume an unscrupulous student uses ChatGPT to cheat and create the content for his/her assignment. We then run it through our internal IIMS plagiarism checker and, lo and behold, it says the content is original material; and indeed it is original material generated by ChatGPT. How can we be sure the assignment is the student’s own original work? And how much, if anything, has the student learned about the topic if his/her assignment has been generated by a chatbot? Myself and two colleagues asked ChatGPT the same question and it came back with three different answers generating original content each time and factually correct in each case.
Of course, this is not just a concern for IIMS. Think of the potential consequences for teachers marking students’ homework, or academics and University Professors assessing a detailed degree thesis. Has it been produced by the student or by artificial intelligence? At this time these are major concerns for educators across the globe.
In February 2023, these mounting concerns prompted the University of Hong Kong to send a campus-wide email to instructors and students stating that the use of ChatGPT, or other AI tools, is strictly prohibited in all classes, assignments, and assessments at the university. Any violations will be treated as plagiarism by the university unless the student obtains the prior written consent from the course instructor. An interesting development.
And others have weighed in with their comments too. Here’s just a small selection
- Kevin Roose of The New York Times labelled ChatGPT “the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public”.
- Samantha Lock of The Guardian newspaper noted that it was able to generate “impressively detailed” and “human-like” text.
- Technology writer Dan Gillmor used ChatGPT on a student assignment, and found its generated text was on par with what a good student would deliver and opined that “academia has some very serious issues to confront”.
- Kelsey Piper of the Vox website wrote that “ChatGPT is the general public’s first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten, and as a result, many of us are stunned” and that ChatGPT is “smart enough to be useful despite its flaws”.
- Stuart Cobbe, a chartered accountant in the UK, decided to test ChatGPT by entering questions from a sample exam paper on the ICAEW website and then entering its answers back into the online test. ChatGPT scored 42 percent, which, while below the 55 percent pass mark, was considered a reasonable attempt.
Before considering what direct impact this might have on the marine surveying and maritime world at large, let’s consider the upsides and downside of ChatGPT.
The positives Here are the potential benefits of ChatGpt:
- ChatGPT provides specific responses to user queries and questions.
- Follow up questions and prompts. ChatGPT can answer follow up questions and prompts as you continue an ongoing dialogue with it, giving you more understanding on the original question you asked.
- Admits its mistakes. If something goes wrong, ChatGPT seems to recognise that, will admit its mistakes and helps you get to the right answer.
- Reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is designed to filter out inappropriate language and requests.
- User-friendly. Chatting with ChatGPT seems no different to speaking with another human and provides fluid and accurate replies. It is user-friendly, composes its replies the way
a human might and has an intuitive interface.
- ChatGPT is multilingual. The software can detect for dialogue in 73 different languages and can provide intelligent answers in the language of the user.
The negatives The drawbacks and disadvantages of ChatGPT:
- ChatGPT is designed to generate plausible conversations based on what it’s learned from training data, but sometimes it can return answers that don’t make any sense or are totally inaccurate.
- Monitoring for misuse. The use of natural language processing could be considered a double- edged sword. While it allows the system to follow instructions, it can also be convenient for misusing it too. If users give instructions to generate unsafe responses, ChatGPT may not be able to identify those instructions and could process them.
- Lack of knowledge and making up facts. At this time ChatGPT has no data beyond September 2021 so cannot deal with topical questions. ChatGPT is only as accurate as the data it’s fed. If the data is outdated or insufficient, it can lead to inaccurate responses and even complete falsehoods.
- Lack of quality control. Quality control is difficult to implement when using ChatGPT. Since it is simply generating text based on what it is told, it is unable to understand any nuances or levels of quality.
- ChatGPT cannot be used in all situations. For complex tasks involving reasoning or explanation, it is not suitable.
- Since ChatGPT is modelled on natural language processing, the AI is not sophisticated enough to understand the user’s moods or facial expressions. Similarly, its accuracy in detecting and responding to the user’s intent is relatively low.
The Report • June 2023 • Issue 104 | 49
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