The computer ate my homework
By Barry McCall, The Irish Times
The launch of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) sparked a wave of panic in the academic world, with some lecturers going so far as to claim that the end of the traditional college essay was nigh. Others were more sanguine, pointing to the technology’s capacity for hallucination as a source of comfort and contending that ways would be found to identify machine-produced essays.
Regardless of which viewpoint you subscribe to, the fact remains that the generative artificial intelligence (GenAi) genie is now out of the bottle, and it is not about to go away. The issue for academics and others is how to accommodate this new fact of life.
UCD School of Business associate professor Alessia Paccagnini believes academics need to embrace the technology and incorporate it into curriculums but is also keenly aware of the challenges it presents.
“Generative AI is a big threat to academic integrity because it makes it so easy for students to write essays, reports, and other homework without putting in any real effort and their personal contribution,” she explains. “This leads to plagiarism because most tools that look for plagiarism need help finding content that was made by AI. GenAi assignments also keep students from learning important skills like research, writing and thinking critically because they skip the learning process. This false representation of ability not only makes academic work less reliable, but it also gives students who use AI an unfair edge over those who don’t.” Read the full article here.
This article was originally published as part of the Irish Times Special Report on AI on July 26, 2024.
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