JANUARY 26, 2023 VOLUME 116 ISSUE 6
since 1906
REBECCA STREEF GAZETTE
Is it wrong for a robot to do your homework? LUCAS ARENDER FEATURES EDITOR
Y
ou’ve got an essay due in 12 hours, you’ve put it off until the last minute, now here you are with 20 readings to do, a blank page and an inescapable feeling of dread. You could drink a litre of coffee, skim through dozens of papers that read like instruction manuals and pound at your keyboard like your life depends on it, or…. You could punch a few prompts into ChatGPT and have your essay done in less than a minute. The choice is yours. It’s not an exaggeration to say the world —
post-secondary schools and beyond — has been changed by ChatGPT. AI researcher, professor and Western University’s chief digital information officer Mark Daley, says the program is “one of the most exciting creative tools ever developed by humanity.” Daley expects in the next five years everyone will have an AI co-pilot like ChatGPT, for work and for daily life. In the context of academia, he expects professors will be weary of the technology, but believes — like with calculators and typewriters before — they will eventually come around. “Some [professors] are going to react to radical new technologies with caution, which is fair, but I think in relatively short order, it'll be understood
that this is just a new technology,” Daley says. “What will overcome that caution is experience using the technology and seeing what it can do for themselves and their students.” Daley has been a professor at Western for over 18 years, with artificial intelligence being his primary research focus. He has long studied language models like ChatGPT and says he was pleasantly surprised by how quickly a model of this sophistication was released. OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has created other natural language models, however, none of them compare to this latest release in functionality or popularity. While post-secondary institutions around the world are hitting the panic button, trying to figure
out how to prevent students from using ChatGPT to cheat, Daley is encouraging his students to use the software. In fact, Daley doesn’t even consider using the AI bot to write essays and answer homework problems cheating. “This is not only not cheating, it's something I'd encourage my students to jump in, and start using this thing and figure out how to use it. Because this is going to be with you for the rest of your life.” Western president Alan Shepard sees things differently. CONTINUED ON P4
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