‘Lecturers Can’t Stop Students From Using It’: Maltese AI Undergraduate Speaks On ChatGPT
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that was trained using machine learning and natural language processing to generate conversations – and is causing major concerns for the future of jobs in certain sectors, as well as major implications for society.
A Maltese student, Mario Vella, is studying for a Bachelor of Science in Information Tech (Hons) degree focusing on AI, and he claims that ChatGPT, the most user-friendly AI model to exist to date, is enabling users to ask it any question or request, and guarantees that it will provide relevant information and answers.
Maltese students have already been using the AI chatbot to help them write their essays and assignments, which is why lecturers are raising their concerns – claiming that this is considered to be cheating.
When asked whether there’s a way for lecturers to stop students from using it, Vella replied saying that ”lecturers can’t stop students from using it. This is because the AI writes an essay, for example, the same way a human would”.
“Now people around the world are trying to create programs to detect this AI-generated material however, this can be short-lived as the detector might end up training the AI model further and then becoming useless in a few months, if not weeks.”
This means that any future detector which may be used to catch students using it might actually end up helping the AI model gain more information, counteracting the whole point of the detector’s existence.
Vella claims it is unfair to tell students that using AI is cheating ”since different courses require different things, and most of the time assignments might need the student to elaborate more than just a simple statement, so they would have to know what they are reading”.
“I strongly disagree that someone can get through a University course using just this AI”.
”However, ChatGPT shouldn’t be blindly trusted. Even though it is right most of the time, there are still certain things which this model is not up to speed with. Considering this is a language AI model which cannot access the internet for information,” Vella continued.
In Malta, there’s still a long way to go when it comes to AI, in fact, locals who want to specialise in it are already moving abroad.
When asked whether AI could potentially replace other things which are more commonly used like conducting a search on Google, Vella replied by saying that everything has its own purpose and nothing can really be replaced, at least, not for a very long time.
Have you used ChatGPT? What do you make of it?
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