It claims to be an undeniable fact that the launching of ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) has impacted, at a swift blow, the educational landscape - the academia or academic arena in the specified term - with its supposed probable hit and touch. Since its inception on 30 November 2022 by OpenAI, it has raised and been raising eyebrows among academic experts regarding the ensuing changing dynamics in academic perspective as it is featured with the debugging computer programs, writing an academic assignments, poetry, lyric, translation, and summarizing texts, which are academic activities directly linked to grading a learner at a certain stage of their achievement, thus helping the authority to adopt curative measures for the improvement of the learners for future progressive reports.
Within two months, in January 2023, the users reached 100 million of this program, and it generates 1.8 billion visitors to this service site per month. The recent, March 2023, Pew research poll suggests that 14% of adult Americans have tried ChatGPT, at least once, for various purposes. Forbes report claims that 43% of students have the experience of using ChatGPT for the purpose of writing assignments and taking part in the tests, thus, the undeniable impact on academic activities can be measured, believe it or not.
Now that, the matter of concern that picks our conscience turns to be how much impact excessive reliance on the ChatGPT for the test and task completion purpose it creates for them who are the users for academic causes.Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago proposed a taxonomy in 1956 where he labeled six skills a learner achieves, and analysis, evaluation, and creation rest at the higher order thinking skills, which are the parameter of a learner's advanced level thinking capability and applicable ability of his learned lessons.
In the case of academic research, the report claims that ChatGPT can write impressive research papers at an almost accurate vein regarding structural dimensions. Lots of papers, already published, insist on this chatbot being the co-author. However, it has also pitfalls. This bot bears out the tendency ofdrawing conclusionsat any cost. Hence, it brings about misleading information along with an inaccurate citation.It is also reported by many experts that it puts forward results and interpretation with the help of fabricated data sets.Again, the chatbot forgets the previous answer to the asked question. Hence, one may possibly come across diversified responses from the same question, which plays down the replicability of the academic research work.Accordingly, the credibility, in the case of research work, is marred by the site of diversified prompts. Thus, many low-quality research works can possibly be given birth to by identical data sets.
This pushes up the quantities of research work by sacrificing quality and validity, as this chatbot is inclined to 'hallucinate'- the tendency to claim inaccurate results which are not retrieved from the training materials as it tends to work by filling up the gaps at every situation.But, C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, claims that the term, 'hallucination', cannot go along with this type of large language model, as hallucination linked to false perception of what was once familiar to the preceptor.Reversely, these bots respond to any question which is not known to it due to non-provision during training.For example, upon asking the question of the population in the moon, it will respond with a figure without informing that they cannot answer this due to information gap. Here, the bot has responded which is not known to it, or it does not care for the falsification. Hence, Brandon tends to term this attitude of chatbot towards falsehood as 'bullshit' in place of 'hallucination'.
Viewing the detrimental effect of ChatGPT in the assessment process of the learners, and the credibility of the research work, many academic institutions around the globe, journal publishing companies like Nature, and 15 countries including China, Russia, North Korea, and so on, till date, have banned this chatbot. Yet, there lie considerable issues to brood over on the use of this droid in the academic arena. This world is experiencing the era of open-source information.The learners have lots of options to carry out an assignment with the help of open-sources.
Here, concerted effort, patience, and ethical consideration are required to come across the solution of any crisis. The misuse of ChatGPT in the academic landscape takes place out of human curiosity and fun. The report, which Forbes publishes, claims that 51% of learners opines using chatbot for academic purpose is a type of cheating, indicating the unacknowledged use of it being unethical.Yet, no invention cannot claim its unmixed blessing, though the use and misuse largely depend on the users. The academic institutions have to play their part here to formulate guidelines for the learners and the researchers to follow as mandatory in case of using this tool. Then, the effective use of this tool will gain much without down playing academic advancement.
The writer is a Researcher & Editorial Board Member,International Journal of Recent Innovation in Academic Research
