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ChatGPT (and the other GPTs) is an example of "large language models" that are making a big splash at the moment due to their unprecedented abilities at generating plausible text on demand. Of course it's far from perfect -- for example, many people noticed its tendency to make up facts. But here at university we're noticing its impact. Many conversations around the coffee machine about how to grade students' work, and the extent to which students are using ChatGPT.

Students in my class have used ChatGPT to do the following:

• improve a piece of their own writing, to make it more formal/scientific (this has been mentioned pretty often, and I guess there's a lot of this going on);
• generate Python code for their exercise/project, or to help them work out "the next step" in some coding that they're working on;
• diagnose errors in their code (supplying it with the error message and the code snippet);
• convert formats e.g. convert an Excel table into Latex;
• suggestions for keywords or topics that they should look up while doing their literature search.

All of these are in my opinion pretty good, positive examples of how to use an AI assistant without defrauding the university system. As long as you can learn how to use an AI assistant without cutting out your learning process, it's a good "teaching assistant". That is the new skill to learn.

Our university department has had a very interesting reaction to the availability of these tools. Instead of a blanket "no" response (which would be understandable given the vastly increased risk of some types of cheating), we now ask for a "statement of technology" with every report (e.g. thesis), i.e. a statement of what technologies were used to accelerate the work, and how they were used. There are many technologies, e.g. auto-translation, or grammar-checking, and it's very coherent to include ChatGPT within a general policy.

The standard plagiarism-checking system (TurnItIn) can't detect this new type of auto-generation. That's certainly an issue, and we will have to wait and see how that plays out. But still, old-fashioned plagiarism happens, so we still use plagiarism checkers, and perhaps they will improve. We now have to teach students, not only how to avoid plagiarism in cited/quoted work etc, but what to do and what to avoid when using text-generation systems. It seems so far that, generally, students understand that

1. it would be fraudulent/plagiaristic to submit ChaptGPT text directly as if it was their own;
2. ChatGPT text might not get them the highest marks anyway;
3. but on the other hand, it's a useful tool that can help them to learn.

I asked one group if they thought students would be at a disadvantage if they didn't use this tech, and the answer was "Yes".

In general, ChatGPT produces plausible and fluent prose (or code), but it has a few drawbacks which means students need to be careful and critical with its outputs: It can be bland and generic, not really getting the incisive point. It often makes up facts, or people, or citations. It can generate bad code, or working-but-poor code that becomes hard to debug. It seems clear that students understand this.

Teachers also understand that their teaching methods must account for its existence: for example, instead of pretending we can insist that no students look at ChatGPT, some teachers use it to generate "example answers", and then the class is invited to critique those answers.

There's a political/systemic question, of the concentration of power in the company that controls this tech, that absorbs and privatises all of the text data that anyone might enter into the system. I think there will be rival systems, and truly open-source systems, with the same capabilities pretty soon. But all the same, this concentration leads to the same concentration of data that the search giants such as Google have capitalised on in recent decades - so, the same situation, but even more concerning as the power of these systems becomes more impressive.

I don't blame students for using this algorithm. For now, I don't want to use it myself, partly for these systemic reasons. The technology is powerful and useful. Can it be made truly open: available to all, without having to submit your data to some foreign company? Can it be held democratically accountable, so that its impacts can be managed by a political process that gives everyone an equal say (i.e. our governments)?

In principle, we can answer these systemic questions "yes" -- and hopefully we'll get there. But the issues aren't new, they're the same ongoing issues of the concentration of power and resources in modern highly-connected societies, in which data is one of the increasingly pivotal resources. Thus far we haven't really succeeded in keeping power and resource from becoming hyper-concentrated over the past 40 years. The issues aren't new, but they become more and more obvious.

(Further reading on the power dynamics: "ChatGPT and more: Large scale AI models entrench big tech power".)