Weekly Briefing: What to Do About ChatGPT

Whatever you do, don't ignore the chatbot. ADVERTISEMENT [Weekly Briefing Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. Whatever you do, don’t ignore it. ChatGPT is here to stay. For about three months, ChatGPT has dominated headlines and the minds of students and instructors alike. The easy-to-use chatbot, which learns by finding patterns in vast amounts of digital text, is nearly everywhere. And colleges are still trying to understand how much this technology will change teaching and how institutions should respond. ChatGPT can produce letters, essays, contracts, computer code, lecture notes, and more, but it’s not perfect. The chatbot runs on a “large language model” or a word predictor that trains on huge resources of data. Not all of its suggestions are accurate or creative. So far, there are two schools of thought about the future of ChatGPT. Many academics say that these tools are dangerous to learning, and that students will use the chatbot to avoid coming up with original ideas, showing their knowledge, or thinking critically. Other professors say that AI can be incorporated into academic life. The tools can help students and professors brainstorm ideas, start an essay, explain an idea, or edit awkward first drafts. These faculty members also argue that they have to prepare students for a world where AI may be a part of their everyday lives. Both groups — and the folks still figuring out where they stand on the technology — have to ask themselves complicated questions. Should instructors redesign their tests and assignments to reduce the likelihood that students will try to pass off AI work as their own? What guidance should students get from this technology? And do academic-integrity policies need to be rewritten? Some colleges are tackling these questions by creating campuswide committees. Teaching centers are putting on workshops. Some professors are writing their own [newsletters]( on the topic, creating explainer videos, or crowdsourcing resources and new classroom policies. Teaching experts say that academics can’t afford to ignore ChatGPT. Sooner or later they will face this technology in their classrooms. In a [recent poll]( more than 1,000 members of Educause, a nonprofit focused on technology in higher education, 37 percent of respondents said AI is already affecting undergraduate teaching, and 30 percent said it is changing faculty development. In one of Serge Onyper’s neuroscience courses, he asks first-year students to write an essay that includes a thesis and evidence. He asks students to think of the benefits of stress — on their own, then as a group, and finally to use ChatGPT to see the chatbot’s response. Onyper, an associate professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University, says ChatGPT should never substitute for students’ coming up with their own ideas, but he’s OK with their using AI to brainstorm further. He also said it’s fine for students whose first language is not English to run their copy through the program to smooth out mistakes. Anna Mills, an English instructor at the College of Marin, in California, said instructors should consider how AI can be risky for some students. Sure these programs can provide free and easy-to-use research tools or explainers. Mills provided feedback to OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, on the program’s guidance for educators. She said the program itself cautions that users need a bit of expertise to verify its recommendations. Students who uses ChatGPT because they don’t have the expertise may be the students who aren’t ready to assess the software’s suggestions. [Read our Beth McMurtrie’s full story here](. 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