ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence in higher education: Quick start guide
11
Academic integrity
The main concern that has been expressed about ChatGPT
in higher education relates to academic integrity.
11
HEIs and
educators have sounded alarm bells about the increased risk
of plagiarism and cheating if students use ChatGPT to prepare
or write essays and exams. This may have deeper implications
for subjects that rely more on written inputs or information
recall, areas that ChatGPT can better support.
There are also concerns that existing tools to detect
plagiarism may not be effective in the face of writing done
by ChatGPT. This has already led to the development of other
applications that can detect whether AI has been used in
writing. In the meantime, multiple HEIs around the world have
banned ChatGPT due to concerns around academic integrity
and others have updated or changed the way they do
assessments, basing them instead on in-class or non-written
assignments.
Lack of regulation
ChatGPT is not currently regulated, a concern addressed by
the UNESCO
Recommendation on the Ethics of AI (see next
section). The extremely rapid development of ChatGPT has
caused apprehension for many, leading a group of over 1,000
academics and private sector leaders to publish an open letter
calling for a pause on the development of training powerful
AI systems.
12
This cessation would allow time for potential
risks to be investigated and better understood and for shared
protocols to be developed.
Privacy concerns
In April 2023, Italy became the first country to block ChatGPT
due to privacy related concerns.
13
The country’s data
protection authority said that there was no legal basis for
the collection and storage of personal data used to train
ChatGPT. The authority also raised ethical concerns around
the tool’s inability to determine a user’s age, meaning minors
may be exposed to age-inappropriate responses. This
example highlights wider issues relating to what data is being
collected, by whom, and how it is applied in AI.
11 See also: Sullivan, M., Kelly, A. and McLaughlan, P. (2023) ‘ChatGPT in higher education: Considerations for academic integrity and student learning’,
Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, 6(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2023.6.1.17.
12 https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
13 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406
14 See also: https://code.intef.es/noticias/chatgpt-un-riesgo-o-una-oportunidad-para-el-sector-educativo/; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chatgpt-
large-language-model-bias-60-minutes-2023-03-05/
15 UNESCO IESALC (2021) Women in higher education: has the female advantage put an end to gender inequalities? Available at: https://unesdoc.
unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000377182; https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/closing-the-gender-gap
Cognitive bias
It is important to note that ChatGPT is not governed by
ethical principles and cannot distinguish between right and
wrong, true and false. This tool only collects information from
the databases and texts it processes on the internet, so it
also learns any cognitive bias found in that information. It is
therefore essential to critically analyse the results it provides
and compare them with other sources of information.
Gender and diversity
Concerns about gender and other forms of discrimination are
not unique to ChatGPT but to all forms of AI.
14
On the one
hand, this reflects the lack of female participation in subjects
related to AI and in research/development on AI and on
the other hand, the power of generative AI to produce and
disseminate content that discriminates or reinforces gendered
and other stereotypes.
15
Accessibility
There are two main concerns around the accessibility of
ChatGPT. The first is the lack of availability of the tool in
some countries due to government regulations, censorship,
or other restrictions on the internet. The second concern
relates to broader issues of access and equity in terms of the
uneven distribution of internet availability, cost and speed.
In connection, teaching and research/development on AI
has also not been evenly spread around the world, with
some regions far less likely to have been able to develop
knowledge or resources on this topic.
Commercialization
ChatGPT was created by a private company, OpenAI. Whilst
the company has pledged to maintain a free version of
ChatGPT, it has launched a subscription option (currently
US$20/month) that offers greater reliability and faster access
to new versions of the tool. The involvement of private
entities in higher education is not new and calls for care
and regulation if selecting AI and other tools that are run by
companies dependent on making profit, may not be open
source (and therefore more equitable and available), and
which may be extracting data for commercial purposes.