Academia grapples with ChatGPT
Are Namibian universities ready for AI and its consequences?
With the ChatGPT platform now readily available to students, the University of Namibia (Unam) is encouraging ethical behaviour and originality in assignment submissions, trusting that students will uphold academic integrity and produce work that reflects their own efforts and insights.
Jeanette Diergaardt
In a recent interview, Simon Namesho, spokesperson for the University of Namibia (Unam), addressed questions regarding ChatGPT and the measures being taken by the institution to handle this issue.
Namesho emphasised that, as a leading institution of higher learning, Unam places a strong emphasis on cultivating the ethical values of its students and fostering the professional development of its academic staff.
He said the university will be using Turnitin, a software capable of detecting the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the writing of students.
Namibia also does not have a lot of digital content available online, which will make it more difficult for students to get generic content about Namibia, said Namesho, adding that an experienced eye of the lecturers will also be able to detect if a piece is not original.
At a women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) event earlier this month, Professor Anicia Peters, pro vice chancellor for research, innovation, and development at Unam, said students have to reference sources for assignments and therefore using Chat GPT might not be as efficient.
Peters also spoke about a collaboration with Google to develop an AI curriculum, which is being funded by the tech giant.
“Here at Unam, we are busy developing an Africa curriculum. And we have collaborators across Africa. So it is really a big effort that we are making to develop that AI curriculum,” said Peters.
AI revolution
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022.
The platform utilised by ChatGPT draws on a wide range of sources – including news articles, literary works, and social media – to generate its responses. Although the information provided is not delivered in real time, the platform’s unique typewriter effect creates a more natural and seamless interaction between users and the chatbot. By leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies, ChatGPT represents a groundbreaking new tool for communication and information-sharing in the digital age.
In its own words, ChatGPT says it is a “variant of the GPT language model developed by OpenAI. It is a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model that has been trained on a large dataset of text from the internet to generate human-like responses to text-based inputs. ChatGPT can be used for a variety of NLP tasks, including conversational AI, text completion, text summarisation, and question answering, among others. The model is designed to be highly flexible and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks or used as a general-purpose NLP model.”
In the academic sphere, there is a growing debate over the use of AI for essay writing. Recently, schools and universities in New York have moved to prohibit the use of such technology. Meanwhile, some experts are calling for a more nuanced approach that incorporates AI into classroom instruction. Advocates argue that this approach can equip students with the skills needed to use this technology to their advantage. As this issue continues to evolve, educators and administrators alike will need to carefully consider the potential benefits and risks of AI in the academic realm.
According to ChatGPT, AI has a number of disadvantages that pose a threat to various jobs and raise ethical, bias, and privacy concerns.
The use of AI requires large amounts of data that can put the privacy of individuals at risk.
The chatbot also stated that jobs that require manual labour are at risk of being displaced by AI. Some of these jobs at risk of being displaced are data entry and processing, manufacturing and assembly line work, transportation and delivery, customer service and support, and administrative and clerical jobs.
In a recent interview, Simon Namesho, spokesperson for the University of Namibia (Unam), addressed questions regarding ChatGPT and the measures being taken by the institution to handle this issue.
Namesho emphasised that, as a leading institution of higher learning, Unam places a strong emphasis on cultivating the ethical values of its students and fostering the professional development of its academic staff.
He said the university will be using Turnitin, a software capable of detecting the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the writing of students.
Namibia also does not have a lot of digital content available online, which will make it more difficult for students to get generic content about Namibia, said Namesho, adding that an experienced eye of the lecturers will also be able to detect if a piece is not original.
At a women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) event earlier this month, Professor Anicia Peters, pro vice chancellor for research, innovation, and development at Unam, said students have to reference sources for assignments and therefore using Chat GPT might not be as efficient.
Peters also spoke about a collaboration with Google to develop an AI curriculum, which is being funded by the tech giant.
“Here at Unam, we are busy developing an Africa curriculum. And we have collaborators across Africa. So it is really a big effort that we are making to develop that AI curriculum,” said Peters.
AI revolution
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022.
The platform utilised by ChatGPT draws on a wide range of sources – including news articles, literary works, and social media – to generate its responses. Although the information provided is not delivered in real time, the platform’s unique typewriter effect creates a more natural and seamless interaction between users and the chatbot. By leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies, ChatGPT represents a groundbreaking new tool for communication and information-sharing in the digital age.
In its own words, ChatGPT says it is a “variant of the GPT language model developed by OpenAI. It is a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model that has been trained on a large dataset of text from the internet to generate human-like responses to text-based inputs. ChatGPT can be used for a variety of NLP tasks, including conversational AI, text completion, text summarisation, and question answering, among others. The model is designed to be highly flexible and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks or used as a general-purpose NLP model.”
In the academic sphere, there is a growing debate over the use of AI for essay writing. Recently, schools and universities in New York have moved to prohibit the use of such technology. Meanwhile, some experts are calling for a more nuanced approach that incorporates AI into classroom instruction. Advocates argue that this approach can equip students with the skills needed to use this technology to their advantage. As this issue continues to evolve, educators and administrators alike will need to carefully consider the potential benefits and risks of AI in the academic realm.
According to ChatGPT, AI has a number of disadvantages that pose a threat to various jobs and raise ethical, bias, and privacy concerns.
The use of AI requires large amounts of data that can put the privacy of individuals at risk.
The chatbot also stated that jobs that require manual labour are at risk of being displaced by AI. Some of these jobs at risk of being displaced are data entry and processing, manufacturing and assembly line work, transportation and delivery, customer service and support, and administrative and clerical jobs.
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