Generative AI are state-of-the art language processing AI models that can generate human-like text and have a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modelling and generating text for applications such as chatbots. The most well-known use so far is in creating ChatGPT – a highly capable chatbot. ChatGPT can answer questions, tell stories, produce essays and even write code. This means students can now use ordinary language to direct technology tools to generate, summarize, synthesize, and create unique, sophisticated responses or products in a manner that previously could only be accomplished by humans who had learned that content knowledge or developed specialized skills. This is an unprecedented change in the history of education.

ChatGPT is a chatbot that is so sophisticated that people are suddenly starting to see the potential of AI and how, for better or for worse, it could affect many areas of society and our life, including medicine and education.

There are issues regarding plagiarism with generative AI. Generative AI models like ChatGPT have a tendency to regurgitate content from their training data. At the same time, generative AI like ChatGPT write essays very well. Generative AI’s strength is in generating text and ChatGPT is extremely good at it.

Frieder et al. (2023) reports that ChatGPT performs poorly on advanced Math however ChatGPT can do very well on elementary and high school Math, and well enough to allow school children to cheat in Math. In terms of computer programming, while ChatGPT can write workable Python code, it cannot necessarily program an entire app’s worth of code because ChatGPT lacks context awareness – in other words, the generated code is not appropriate for the context in which it is being used. However, it is advanced enough to allow school children to cheat on programming assignments.

References

Frieder, Pinchetti, L., Griffiths, R.-R., Salvatori, T., Lukasiewicz, T., Petersen, P. C., Chevalier, A., & Berner, J. (2023). Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2301.13867