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Prior to - or instead - of using ChatGPT

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Prior to - or instead - of using ChatGPT

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Prior to (or instead of) using ChatGPT with your students

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I have been thinking, reading, and writing a lot about OpenAI’s ChatGPT product over the last month. I’ve been writing from the perspective of instructional design/faculty development/edtech …

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The almost frantic discourse in higher education about ChatGTP has focused on how it will affect our teaching. Faculty members are rightly concerned about what this technology means for academic integrity, writing instruction, and essay assignments in any discipline. These conversations are in their infancy, and it might take us years to rethink our teaching practices in the wake of this leap forward for artificial intelligence.

But in the meantime, ChatGPT offers a clear message about another major area of faculty work: our own writing. Much academic research reads as if it were prepared by artificial intelligence. It follows strict conventions of form and objectivity, and goes unread all too often. Artificial intelligence can teach academics the importance of having a distinctive writing voice - one that has been conditioned by the experience of being a human, and that a robot would have trouble replicating.

The importance of rethinking our writing practices became clear when we interacted with the bot. Lots of faculty members have been testing ChatGPT lately. But while other folks were feeding it their courses' writing prompts, we took a different tack and asked ChatGPT this question: How could academics reach a wider audience of readers for their writing?

The program spat back a decent response. Its essay was well-organized and based on solid evidence. It mirrored what we might imagine seeing on a set of slides being presented at a conference on writing. It looked, in other words, like a short piece of academic scholarship. And like most works of that genre, the ChatGPT version had erected a wall between the prose on the page and the person (or, in this case, nonperson) who produced it. That wall gave the piece the kind of objective quality that you find in academic journals. It was very easy to scan the essay, get the main ideas, and not really read it in a meaningful way.

As the co-editors of a book series on teaching in higher education, we receive many queries and proposals from academic writers. A significant percentage of those proposals - which often include sample chapters - are written in prose that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT. The author's ideas are laid out like bullet points on a whiteboard, the citations are dense and numerous, and the examples and stories (if there are any) are pale and lifeless.

The most successful books in our series are the ones that don't read like that. Their authors have demolished - or at least weakened - the wall that separates their subject matter from their lives. That doesn't mean they inject a bunch of personal stories into their manuscripts, although some do. Rather, they aren't afraid to write in a way that reveals something of their intellectual journey, their particular interests, and their unique and creative perceptions of the world.

You may feel most comfortable writing for your disciplinary peers in scholarly journals and books, and that's absolutely fine. We all do that sort of writing for job opportunities, tenure, or promotion. But for academics looking to write for a wider audience - whether it's made up of faculty members in other fields or readers outside of higher education - a distinctive writing voice will increase the odds of your work having an impact on the world.

Based on what we have learned as series editors, and what we have tried to apply to our own work, we offer these four strategies to develop a writing voice that sounds human.

Share your passion. Often the first thing that comes to mind when you are trying to inject some humanity into your writing voice is to share a personal anecdote. Our most successful authors commonly use such anecdotes - in moderation. Don't get us wrong: Storytelling is a good move, especially when you do it well (see below). But it's not the only way to let your personality illuminate your work.

You also let readers know who you are when you choose certain references, or when you talk about what you find difficult, puzzling, or exhilarating about the ideas you're presenting. In Geeky Pedagogy, the historian Jessamyn Neuhaus explains how academics can and should share their passion for the material in the classroom. The same applies to academic writing: When you reveal what your inner nerd loves so much about a topic, that can be just as personal as telling stories from your childhood, and just as effective at humanizing the work.

Instead of just presenting conclusions, give the reader a glimpse of your origin story as a researcher, a sense of the stumbling blocks you encountered along the way, and a description of the elation or illumination you felt when you experienced your eureka moment. Revealing such stages in your intellectual journey helps develop, and add power to, your narrative, which will especially appeal to nonacademic readers.

If you tell stories, tell them well. Many academics aspire to see their work in the pages of publications such as The Atlantic or The New Yorker. Such magazines are an excellent fit for experts who do their research and care about the craft of writing. As readers, we love these publications because they feature writers who tell great stories. We get statistics, information, new ideas, yes, but we also get stories mixed generously with evidence.

What kind of stories do you tell in your writing? They don't have to be about you, but they can still reveal much about you. Do you prefer personal anecdotes? Do you like narrating events from the research literature in your field? Current news stories? Allusions to famous works of literature or mythology? The storytelling choices you make give the reader a view into the intellectual life of the person behind the prose.

So you should use stories in your nonfiction writing, but only if they truly contribute to the context and if you can tell them in a compelling way. Great stories include imagery and detail. The excerpt below comes from an October 2022 essay in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer for the magazine, on the botched execution of a prisoner in Alabama. She describes the process of arriving to the prison with other journalists to witness the execution:

The van passed through gated checkpoints and razor-wire fences, orange floodlights scattering the shadows. The driver and a uniformed corrections officer who rode with him herded us through a guard shack outfitted with a metal detector, then took our phones and identification. A second van drove us a negligible distance up the gated road to the execution chamber. At 10:30 p.m., two uniformed guards guided us, again, out of the van. This time we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac terminating in the high walls and slit windows of Holman's death row. The squat building sat beside us, its heavy door cracking open, occasionally, startlingly, to spill light into the dimness. But no word came from within. And so we paced, and waited.

She sets the scene so well that you might not realize how many descriptive words are included: "orange floodlights," "shadows," "gated," "cul-de-sac," "squat," "slit," "light," "dimness." Adding to the power of these images are details that give us other kinds of information. For example, we are told that Bruenig and her companions are released from the van at 10:30 p.m. That small detail tells us much: It has very likely been a long day for the journalists, and they are tired. The prolonging of the day would intensify the prisoner's fear and the anguished waiting of his family. The ripple effect caused by the execution's timing intensifies the pain for everyone involved, highlighting the brutality of capital punishment.

Granted, stories are supporting actors in logical arguments, and not the stars of the show. Give us a story to support one side of a debatable topic, and we'll find a story to support the other. Stories should supplement and illustrate the more traditional forms of evidence that you have gathered as an academic and are now showing to your reader. But they are great at drawing readers into your arguments, offering new perspectives on your subject, and giving your readers a break from other kinds of cognitive work.

Resist the evidence dump. Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" The answer, in the end, was six feet: the space in which to bury a human body. The story's title and theme critique the very human desire to gather up and display far more material goods (land, houses, possessions) than any one person really needs.

That same desire can infect academic authors when it comes to evidence. Experts at doing research, we will go to great lengths to find and document sources, data, surveys, interviews, and the like. In some cases we pile up evidence because we really want to convince the reader of our argument. But often we make an evidence dump because we want the reader to see our expertise and know that we did our homework. If we've read a source, we want to show people that we've read it. Look at all my citations!

But we write to reach readers, not just to display the depth of our erudition. Especially if you wish to write for nonspecialist audiences, including academics outside of your field, don't fixate on how much evidence you have but on how much evidence will persuade your intended audience.

ChatGPT distills everything on the internet through its filter and dumps it on the reader; your flawed and beautiful mind, by contrast, makes its mark on your subject by choosing the right evidence, not all the evidence. Find the six feet that your reader needs, and put the rest of your estate up for auction.

Lose the hedging habit. A final feature of both robotic and academic prose is the generous use of hedging. Academic writers are heavily conditioned to buffer strong statements lest we be accused of overclaiming or ignoring counterarguments. This can be a hard habit to break when you've spent your whole writing career reining in your words for fear of incurring the wrath of Reviewer 2. Disciplinary peers will always expect you to counter your own arguments and acknowledge exceptions.

Yet readers outside of your discipline are less likely to be concerned about all of the ways in which some segment of your argument might be wrong. They are looking for ideas, insights, information, advice.

There are times when you absolutely do want to emphasize certain nuances and stay on the right side of the facts. At those junctures, verbiage like "arguably," "some evidence suggests," and "perhaps" are your good friends, and can alert the reader to major splits in opinion or big caveats about what scholars still don't know. But deployed routinely as a defense against criticism - the reflex move of so many academic writers - it will drain the life out of your work.

Describe the facts. Tell your stories. Lay out your interpretation. And then trust your reader to decide whether you've made your case.

Ultimately, as an academic writer, you can credibly say things that a robot can't. You've experienced life in a way that it has not and never could. Finding a distinctive voice in your writing doesn't mean oversharing, putting feelings over facts, or straying off of your hard-won expertise. It does mean tapping into your discretion about what evidence to include, offering the warmth of your story as the writer, and sharing sensory detail about what an experience was like for an actual human who was there. It means getting out of the way so that the reader can feel the impact of your most powerful ideas.

It's not easy to write like a human, especially now, when AI or the worn-in grooves of scholarly habits are right there at hand. Resist the temptation to produce robotic prose, though, and you'll find that you're reaching new human readers, in the way that only human writers can.

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The almost frantic discourse in higher education about ChatGTP has focused on how it will affect our teaching. Faculty members are rightly concerned about what this technology means for academic integrity, writing instruction, and essay assignments in any discipline.

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Advice from 11 Academics on using ChatGPT

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Advice from 11 Academics on using ChatGPT

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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Ever since the chat bot ChatGPT burst into public view in late 2022, students, professors and administrators have been woozy from a chaotic cocktail of excitement, uncertainty and fear. The bot writes poems, sonnets and essays. It also serves as a convincing debate partner on a seemingly unlimited number of subjects. Given that the natural language model earned passing scores on the evidence and torts portion of the bar exam, among other feats, some in academe fret that the technology may facilitate widespread cheating. Others see opportunity for accelerating discussions about reimagining teaching to help students write prose that differs from what machines can produce.

The artificial intelligence language model was released by OpenAI and is currently offered free as a research preview. It interacts with users in a conversational way, including by answering questions, admitting its mistakes, challenging falsehoods and rejecting inappropriate requests such as, "Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015."

"This question is a bit tricky because Christopher Columbus died in 1506, so he could not have come to the U.S. in 2015," ChatGPT replied in a sample presented on the OpenAI website. (The chat bot is in such high demand that, during this time this article was written, it was at capacity.) "But let's pretend for a moment that he did! If Columbus arrived in the US in 2015 ... he might be surprised to find out that many people don't view him as a hero anymore; in fact, some people argue that he was a brutal conqueror who enslaved and killed native people."

Faculty members and administrators are now reckoning in real time with how-not if-ChatGPT will impact teaching and learning. Inside Higher Ed caught up with 11 academics to ask how to harness the potential and avert the risks of this game-changing technology. The following edited, condensed advice suggests that higher ed professionals should think a few years out, invite students into the conversation and-most of all-experiment, not panic.

Be Deliberate. Adjust Quickly.
Nancy Gleason, associate professor of practice of political science and director of the Hilary Ballon Center for Teaching and Learning, New York University, Abu Dhabi
We cannot ban AI aids. But we also should not use them for all assignments. We can teach students that there is a time, place and a way to use GPT3 and other AI writing tools. It depends on the learning objectives.

First, familiarize yourself with AI writing aids. Your librarians and academic technicians can help. Faculty members need time to play with new tools and explore their implications. Administrators can carve out time for faculty training support. How does bias play out in your area within the model? What does the code, poem, text look like relative to how your students normally write or produce? How can you use these tools to enhance teaching methods?

Next, consider the tools relative to your course. What are the cognitive tasks students need to perform without AI assistance? When should students rely on AI assistance? Where can an AI aid facilitate a better outcome? Are there efficiencies in grading that can be gained? Are new rubrics and assignment descriptions needed? Will you add an AI writing code of conduct to your syllabus? Do these changes require structural shifts in timetabling, class size or number of teaching assistants?

Finally, talk with students about instructions, rules and expectations. Provide this information on course websites and syllabi and repeat it in class. Guide teaching assistants in understanding appropriate uses of AI assistance for course assignments. Divisions or departments might agree on expectations across courses. That way, students need not scramble to interpret academic misconduct across multiple courses.

Don't Abandon Pencil and Paper.
Michael Mindzak, assistant professor in the department of educational studies, Brock University
For some assessments, professors may need to revert to traditional forms of teaching, learning and evaluation, which can be viewed as more human-centric.

Question How Writing Is Taught.
Steve Johnson, senior vice president for innovation, National University
Resist asking conservative questions such as, "How can we minimize negative impacts of AI tools in writing courses?" Instead, go big. How do these tools allow us to achieve our intended outcomes differently and better? How can they promote equity and access? Better thinking and argumentation? How does learning take place in ways we haven't experienced before?

In the past, near-term prohibitions on slide rules, calculators, word processors, spellcheck, grammar check, internet search engines and digital texts have fared poorly. They focus on in-course tactics rather than on the shifting contexts of what students need to know and how they need to learn it. Reframing questions about AI writers will drive assignment designs and assessments that can minimize academic integrity concerns while promoting learning outcomes.

Think a Few Years Out.
Ted Underwood, p rofessor of information sciences and English and associate dean of academic affairs in the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign More Insights About ChatGPT
ChatGPT is free and easy to use, so recent conversations often use it as shorthand for the whole project of language modeling. That's understandable, but we should be thinking more broadly. The free demonstration period will end. When it does, students and teachers may migrate to a different model. Language models will also continue to develop. By 2024, we are likely to see models that can cite external sources to back up their claims. Prototypes of that kind already exist.

Instead of treating ChatGPT as the horizon, look farther out. Our approach to teaching should be guided not by one recent product but by reflection on the lives our students are likely to lead in the 2030s. What will the writing process look like for them? Will they use models as research assistants? As editors?

No crystal ball can answer those questions yet. But the uncertainty itself is a reminder that our goal is not to train students for specific tasks but to give them resilience founded on broad understanding. We can teach students to use a particular model or warn them about the limits of existing technology. But I also hope we back up a little to ask where language models came from and why this technology is even possible. For instance, it's surprising that training models to predict the next word in a passage also had the side effect of teaching them how to draw logical inferences from new passages on new topics. It wasn't obvious 10 years ago that approach would work. Discussing why it does work may help students see why the details of writing matter and why it's hard to separate writing from thinking.

In short, I don't think we need to revise all our assignments tomorrow in response to one model. But writing practices are likely to change over the next decade, and students should understand not just how but why they're changing. That's a big question about the purpose of writing-not one we can delegate to computer science. Professors in every discipline will need to learn a little about language models and pay attention to their continued development.
Mina Lee, doctoral student in computer science, Stanford University
Delegate Responsibilities.

Teachers can oversee the selection of appropriate language models or AI-based tools to ensure they meet student needs and school policies. Students could be responsible for using the model to generate language that is accurate, appropriate for the audience and purpose, and reflective of their own voices, while monitoring and reporting issues they encounter. Lastly, the college's administration can be responsible for providing feedback to the developer and updating the school's policies regarding the use of AI writing assistants.

The individuals will need resources and support to fulfill their responsibilities. Remember that the goal is to share responsibility, not lay blame. Not everyone has the same level of expertise or experience. Work together to ensure the safe, responsible and beneficial use of AI writing tools.
Anna Mills, English instructor, College of Marin
Identify and Reveal Shortcomings.

ChatGPT's plausible outputs are often not solid foundations for scaffolding. If we direct students to AI writing tools for some learning purpose, we should teach critical AI literacy at the same time. We can emphasize that language models are statistical predictors of word sequences; there is no understanding or intent behind their outputs. But warning students about the mistakes that result from this lack of understanding is not enough. It's easy to pay lip service to the notion that AI has limitations and still end up treating AI text as more reliable than it is. There's a well-documented tendency to project onto AI; we need to work against that by helping students practice recognizing its failings.

One way to do this is to model generating and critiquing outputs and then have students try on their own. (In order to teach about ChatGPT's failings, we'll need to test any examples and exercises right before teaching, since language models are frequently updated.) Finally, we should assess how well students can identify ChatGPT failings in terms of logic, consistency, accuracy and bias. Can they detect fabrications, misrepresentations, fallacies and perpetuation of harmful stereotypes? If students aren't ready to critique ChatGPT's output, then we shouldn't choose it as a learning aid.

Showcasing AI failings has the added benefit of highlighting students' own reading, writing and thinking capacities. We can remind them that they are learning to understand and to express themselves with purpose, things a language model cannot do. Draw attention to the virtues of human-written prose and prompt students to reflect on how their own cognitive processes surpass AI.
Johann N. Neem, professor of history, Western Washington University
Remind Students to Think.

With ChatGPT, a student can turn in a passable assignment without reading a book, writing a word or having a thought. But reading and writing are essential to learning. They are also capacities we expect of college graduates.

ChatGPT cannot replace thinking. Students who turn in assignments using ChatGPT have not done the hard work of taking inchoate fragments and, through the cognitively complex process of finding words, crafting thoughts of their own.

With an hour or so of work, a student could turn an AI-generated draft into a pretty good paper and receive credit for an assignment they did not complete. But I worry more that students will not read closely what I assign. I fear that they will not be inspired, or challenged, by the material. If the humanities grew out of the study-and love of-words, what happens when words don't matter to our students?

Professors should find new ways to help students learn to read and write well and to help them make the connection between doing so and their own growth. I anticipate offering more opportunities for students to write in class. In-class writing should not just be additive; hopefully, my classes will in time look and feel different as students learn to approach writing as a practice of learning as well as a demonstration of it.
Paul Fyfe, associate professor of English and director of the graduate certificate in digital humanities, North Carolina State University
Invite Students Into the Conversation.

Higher ed professionals are asking how ChatGPT will affect students or change education. But what do students think? How or why would they use it? And what's it like when they try?

For the past few semesters, I've given students assignments to "cheat" on their final papers with text-generating software. In doing so, most students learn-often to their surprise-as much about the limits of these technologies as their seemingly revolutionary potential. Some come away quite critical of AI, believing more firmly in their own voices. Others grow curious about how to adapt these tools for different goals or about professional or educational domains they could impact. Few believe they can or should push a button to write an essay. None appreciates the assumption they will cheat.

Grappling with the complexities of "cheating" also moves students beyond a focus on specific tools, which are changing stunningly fast and towards a more generalized AI literacy. Frameworks for AI literacy are still being developed; mechanisms for teaching it are needed just as urgently.
Robert Cummings, an associate professor of writing and rhetoric; Stephen Monroe, chair and assistant professor of writing and rhetoric; and Marc Watkins, lecturer in composition and rhetoric, all at the University of Mississippi
Experiment. Don't Panic.

Channel anxiety over ChatGPT into productive experimentation. We built a local team of writing faculty to engage with the tools and to explore pedagogical possibilities. We want to empower our students as writers and thinkers and we know that AI will play a role in their futures. How can we deploy AI writing protocols ethically and strategically within our curricula? Can these tools help underprepared learners? Do some tools work better than others in the classroom? We're at the early stages of investigating these kinds of questions. Our advice centers around some main ideas.

Get started now. Jump in. We cannot control Silicon Valley, and their pace of technological development is frantic and disorienting, but we don't have to keep up with everything. Our group has consciously decided to move slowly and deliberately, but we have decided to move.

AI literacy is crucial for teaching students about AI writing generators. Both students and teachers need to understand the capabilities and limitations of these tools, as well as the potential consequences of using them.

Identify specific tools for specific purposes in the writing process. Some AI-powered tools can help with invention, some with revision and some with locating sources. Prepare student writers to consider the benefits and disadvantages of these tools in the context of specific writing purposes.

Perform a reality check with all AI engagements. Help students be prepared to fact check any AI-generated writing outputs.

Assign reflection to help students understand their own thought processes and motivations for using these tools, as well as the impact AI has on their learning and writing.

Offer rules of citation. As MLA, APA, CMS and other citation systems are attempting to catch up with citation styles for AI-generated writing, advise students on how you want them to cite AI outputs. But treat them as content developed by a third party and be prepared to cite it.

Human learning is gradual, even when AI learning seems instantaneous. That will not change, so teachers will likely be the most important users of AI writing tools. We will mediate, introduce and teach. So, our advice for colleagues is straightforward: start experimenting and thinking now.

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Academic experts offer advice on ChatGPT

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To harness the potential and avert the risks of OpenAI's new chat bot, academics should think a few years out, invite students into the conversation and-most of all-experiment, not panic.

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York University Article with Resource Sections

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York University Article with Resource Sections

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Information and Strategies for Instructors

This page has been created to help instructors understand the capabilities and limitations of generative Artificial Intelligence technology and provide strategies for helping students avoid using it to engage in academic misconduct. The following sections provide information about these tools, paying particular attention to ChatGPT.

Note: Given that AI technology is continuously evolving, the content on this page will be monitored and updated as new information becomes available.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology and Its Capabilities

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools have recently received much attention in the media and within educational institutions. These tools are able to mimic, and at times to exceed, human abilities to research, write, problem-solve, create art, produce videos, and even to "learn" and evolve. As such, there is concern that generative AI tools/apps (e.g., ChatGPT, GPT-3, and DALL-E, among others) can be used to help students engage in academic misconduct. In particular, concerns about text-generating tools such as ChatGPT have risen to the forefront due to their ability to produce content (e.g., essays, programming code, solutions to math problems) that students could then submit for credit without their instructor's knowledge or approval.

About Text-Generating Tools (e.g. ChatGPT)

Text-generating tools such as ChatGPT work on demand: when provided with an inquiry or a prompt from a user, they draw upon substantial banks of knowledge to quickly generate realistic and human-like responses. Although the resulting text produced is not always accurate and may lack depth, this type of technology can jeopardize academic integrity efforts at the institution.

Understanding the Limitations

ChatGPT (GPT stands for Generative, Pre-trained, Transformer) was launched on November 30, 2022 by OpenAI. It is a large language model that has been trained on an extensive amount of data and trained to predict the correct next word within a sentence. ChatGPT can conduct a wide variety of tasks (e.g., answer questions, generate content, summarize text, translate content, etc.) and it can be engaged on a wide variety of topics. Its responses are often coherent and quite impressive, which can lead to the mistaken belief that ChatGPT is more proficient than it actually is. There are limitations in the current version of ChatGPT (3.5), which include:

It draws on a fixed amount of knowledge that is limited to September 2021; ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet, and is therefore unable to search for more current data

It provides incorrect or nonsensical information at times. Furthermore, it presents this information in an authoritative way, which can mislead users

It is inept at citing sources and can produce false citations

The essays it produces can be grammatically correct and easy to read, but they are typically superficial and lack insight. Information may be repeated throughout the essay

Cannot synthesize information from different sources

Does not show evidence of critical thinking

Can reflect the biases of the individuals who created the training data

Addressing AI Technology with Students

As an instructor, anticipate that students will be curious about these tools and that they require clear direction about whether they are permitted to use them for academic work within your course. As such, instructors are encouraged to engage students in an open discussion about AI apps, and how these intersect with academic integrity.

Institutional Expectations

When talking to students, let them know about institutional expectations:

any unauthorized use of ChatGPT (or other AI tools) on assessments is considered to be a breach of academic honesty.

Remind them of York's Senate Policy on Academic Honesty and provide examples about how the unauthorized use of this technology can lead to breaches of:

cheating, if they are using an AI tool to gain an improper advantage on an academic evaluation when it has not been authorized by their instructor (Section 2.1.1), or

plagiarism if they are using images created by another, i.e. through the use of DALL-E or another image-generating tool when not authorized by their instructor and not attributed to the creator(Section 2.1.3).

Be very clear about your expectations, and explicit when providing assignment instructions. To help reduce confusion, ensure these expectations are communicated in various ways, such as including them in eClass, course syllabi, instruction guidelines and repeated in class

Explain how different instructors can have different expectations for AI tools, and if it is permitted by one instructor, this does not mean it will be permitted by others.

Related Student Discussion Topics

You can use the points above as a springboard to further discuss the ethical implications of AI technology in your discipline and any potential problems that can arise. Some guiding discussion questions may include:

1. What do you know about AI apps?

2. Have you used them before? If you have, in what ways?

3. What were your experiences?

4. In your field/discipline, what are some ethical issues that can arise from using these apps?

5. How can you ethically use AI apps to support your learning? (Eaton, 2023)

Grey Areas and Ethical Concerns

You can let students know that there are still many grey areas about AI apps and that there are no clear answers or guidance as of yet (Watkins, 2022). For instance, there are no guidelines on how to appropriately cite content that has been generated by these apps. As well, besides threats to academic integrity, there are implications that by entering prompts and interacting with AI apps, users are helping the technology to improve and evolve. Additionally, ChatGPT collects a significant amount of data from its users which can be shared without a user's knowledge or permission (Trust, n.d.).

Related Student Discussion Topics

Such grey areas can also serve as the springboard for additional classroom discussion and activities, for instance, some suggestions from Eaton (2023) include:

Develop a method for students to communicate when they have used AI apps in their academic work. For instance, they can start with this statement, which has been adapted from OpenAI:

The author generated this [text, image, or video] in part with [insert provider],
a language-, image-, code-, or video- generation model. The author verifies that
they have reviewed, edited and revised the draft provided and takes responsibility for
the content of this [assignment name].  (Open AI, 2022)

Co-create class guidelines/a charter with your students regarding the use of artificial intelligence apps in your courses. Should it be used? If so, what are some guidelines pertaining to its use?

Include an artificial intelligence discussion thread so that students can share information, ask questions, post articles, etc.

1. Have students read OpenAI's privacy policy and terms of use pertaining to ChatGPT and DALL-E. Discuss possible concerns and implications of having their data collected.

2. If users are users are helping the technology to improve and evolve through providing prompts, what are some future implications for work in their field? Will improved AI technology be a source of help or a hindrance?

Leveraging AI Technology as a Learning Tool

Generative AI technology has created a need to revise assessment practices, and at the same time it offers some new possibilities for in-class learning.

Short-Term Strategies

When it comes to assessment, in the short-term, some strategies that can be applied include:

asking students to hand-write assessments in class

replacing written assessments that are submitted through eClass with assessments that are completed in class, including presentations, reflective writing assignments, in-class tests or short essays

requiring students to submit their rough notes along with the final submission of their work

Note: If using the above strategies, be mindful of potential accessibility and equity issues that may arise when shifting assessment modalities.

Longer-Term Strategies

With more time, assessments can be redesigned so that students are not submitting work that AI apps can easily produce. Some ideas for redesigning assessments are listed below.

Consider expanding or replacing written assessments to:

focus more on the process of the writing assignment rather than on the final product

have students emphasize evidence of original thought and critical thinking as AI tools have been shown to be weak at demonstrating these higher-order skills

ask students to use current sources (post-September 2021)

ask students to apply personal experience or personal knowledge to course topics

or, replace a written assessment with a multimodal one

You may also want to update your grading criteria or rubrics to emphasize assessment of deeper discipline-specific skills such as argumentation, use of evidence, or interpretive analysis, rather than the mechanics of writing and essay organization. This can help re-weight your assessments in favour of student learning and away from skills easily performed by AI tools.

Many educators are currently experimenting with integrating generative AI technology into their assessment design. Keeping in mind the limitations of AI, if you decide to incorporate such tools into assessments, some ways that students can use technology like ChatGPT to apply higher-order skills are to:

generate a ChatGPT response to a particular question, and then write an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the ChatGPT response

fact-check the responses that ChatGPT provides to identify incorrect information

generate a paper from ChatGPT and evaluate its logic, consistency, accuracy and bias

use ChatGPT to create an outline that students can then use to develop an essay. (D'Agostino, 2023; Montclair State University, n.d; Trust, n.d.)

In-Class Activities

Beyond formal assessments, generative AI tools can also be used in ungraded or low-stakes learning activities during class time. Bringing this tech into lectures or discussions can help students understand how and when to use AI technology effectively and ethically, and in ways that align with the norms and standards of your disciplinary context. Some learning activities you might consider include:

using AI generated text as the starting point for class discussion on a particular topic. What does it get right? What is it missing? How would it need to be revised to meet the scholarly standards of your field?

having small teams of students experiment in using AI to create text about a given subject, and then comparing the results (what grade would they assign its response using a course rubric?) and/or the process (what prompts and tweaks were needed to generate the text?)

engaging in a class debate against generative AI tech. Use the tool to generate counterarguments that can help them explore perspectives and strengthen their own arguments

asking your students! Gather anonymous feedback about whether they are using the tool, what value it provides them, and how they think it should be used in your disciplinary or teaching context

Future Considerations

Although current generative AI technology includes some limitations, continuous training and the release of new versions mean that these limitations will be corrected. When it comes to ensuring academic integrity, OpenAI is working on a watermark that will identify when text has been produced by AI apps (Wiggins, 2022). As well, there are different types of detectors that can be used, such as: openai-detector or GPTZero (see Resources for more information). To use detectors, most require that you copy and paste content that you suspect has been generated by AI apps. You will receive a probability reading although this could take up to a few minutes.

If you have any questions or require support on academic integrity matters, contact academicintegrity@yorku.ca.

Further Resources

Detection

How to Identify AI Generated Text: https://view.genial.ly/63753092992318001811d46f/interactive-content-ai-generated-text

GLTR demo: http://gltr.io/dist/index.html

GPT-2 Output Detector: openai-detector

GPTZero: https://gptzero.me

Revising Assessments

Bailey, J. (2022, December 7).  Why Teachers Are Worried About AI

D'Agostino, S. (2023, January 31). Designing Assignments in the ChatGPT Era

Eaton, S. and Anselmo, L. (2023, January). Teaching and Learning with Artificial Intelligence Apps

McClennen, N. & Poth, R.  Education is about to radically change: AI for the masses.

McKnight, L. (2022, October 14).  Eight ways to engage with AI writers in higher education.

McVey, C. (2022, December 05).  POV: Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Writing at the University. Let's Embrace It

Mollick, E.R. & Mollick, L. (2022). New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments

Prochaska, E. (2023, January 23). Embrace the Bot: Designing Writing Assignments in the Face of AI

Schulten, K. (2023, January 23). Lesson Plan: Teaching and Learning in the Era of ChatGPT

Webb, M. (2022, August 04).  What's next for AI in higher education?

General Information about AI Technology and Education

Alby, C. (n.d.). ChatGPT: Understanding the new landscape and short-term solutions

Alby, C. (2023, January 7). Can ChatGPT be a blessing?

Ditch that Textbook (2002, December 17). ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education

Kovanovic, K. (2022, December 15).   The dawn of AI has come, and its implications for education couldn't be more significant

Schulten, K. (2023, January 24). How Should Schools Respond to ChatGPT? (Student Opinion)

References

D'Agostino, S. (Jan 12, 2023). ChatGPT advice academics can use now. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/12/academic-experts-offer-advice-chatgpt

Eaton, S. (2023). Teaching and learning with artificial intelligence apps. University of Calgary. https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/teaching-with-AI-apps

Montclair State University (n.d.). Practical responses to ChatGPT. https://www.montclair.edu/faculty-excellence/practical-responses-to-chat-gpt/

OpenAI (2022). Sharing and publication policy. https://openai.com/api/policies/sharing-publication/#content-co-authored-with-the-openai-api-policy

Trust, T. (n.d.). ChatGPT and education. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vo9w4ftPx-rizdWyaYoB-pQ3DzK1n325OgDgXsnt0X0/mobilepresent?slide=id.p

Watkins, R. (2022). Update your course syllabus for chatGPT. https://medium.com/@rwatkins_7167/updating-your-course-syllabus-for-chatgpt-965f4b57b003

Wiggins, K. (2022). OpenAI's attempts to watermark AI text hit limits. TechCrunch+. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/10/openais-attempts-to-watermark-ai-text-hit-limits/

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AI Technology and Academic Integrity - Academic Integrity

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Information and Strategies for Instructors This page has been created to help instructors understand the capabilities and limitations of generative Artificial Intelligence technology and provide strategies for helping students avoid using it to engage in academic misconduct. The following sections provide information about these tools, paying particular attention to ChatGPT.

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AI resource sheet - Taylor Institute for Teaching & Learning - U Calgary 

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AI resource sheet - Taylor Institute for Teaching & Learning - U Calgary 

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Including 10 AI-ready assignment and activity ideas.

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ChatGPT & Education - College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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ChatGPT & Education - College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Is AI coming for white-collar jobs? A psychology professor finds out the hard way

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Is AI coming for white-collar jobs? A psychology professor finds out the hard way

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Q&As

A UBC psychology professor wondered whether AI was smart enough to handle some of his workload. He was astonished to discover it could.

In a paper recently published in Psychological Methods, Dr. Friedrich Götz detailed how he used GPT-2, a precursor to ChatGPT, to develop a psychological test that performed as well as what psychologists currently use. He discusses his research, its implications, how he's making an uneasy peace with AI being part of our collective future-and why you should, too.

Why did you want to explore using AI to create a psychological test?

I had just developed a psychological questionnaire, or scale, and it had taken months to get right. When my co-author, Dr. Rakoen Maertens from the University of Cambridge, and I stumbled on GPT-2, I thought, "I wonder if this thing could do it for me?" We didn't really expect it to be good, but it was.

We used it to create a personality scale and didn't edit any of the questions it generated, apart from selecting which ones we'd use. We then tested it in the field against the current gold-standard scale. We ran two big studies, and it turned out that it was about as good as the best thing that traditional means have produced.

Did the results surprise you?

I was surprised by just how useful it proved it could be. I don't think we're at a stage yet where it's as easy as going to a chatbot and saying, "Create this scale." There's still human oversight required to give it good prompts and make selections from what it generates.

What really surprised me was that it made connections that I hadn't thought of. In the past, when you developed a questionnaire like this, you brought your own biases and your very subjective understanding into it. But this AI had been trained on 40 gigabytes of text, so it had a lot more background knowledge and was able to make connections beyond what I had thought.

What are the implications of these findings?

A big part of working for academics or journalists is to synthesize information. In a way, if we continue down this road, I think AI could replace that. This is equivalent to the industrial revolution, to some degree, when blue-collar workers were suddenly put out of work by machines. I think we should start to consider the possibility that this could happen to some white-collar jobs.

Where do you see the future of AI going in psychology? Will we have AI therapists?

There's emerging evidence that chatbots can foster a real sense of connection for people who have nobody else. I'm not sure I would go as far as saying that AI can or should replace therapists, because it requires much more than just giving you that warm glow of social reciprocity. And it's important for us to remember that, as of today, AI are not sentient feeling, thinking beings. They're mathematical algorithms. It could be that one day we'll have therapists that are completely AI, but I don't think that that's desirable, and I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Will you be using AI for your own work in the future?

I'm spread thin and I could certainly use some extra time, but I'm currently resisting, and I'm also telling my students to not to give in to that temptation. But I do think these things are here to stay.

When ChatGPT came out, for many people, it seemed like a nice party conversation or an interesting thing to play around with on a Sunday afternoon. I'm not a computer scientist or an ethics philosopher, but as a fellow human and citizen, we need to get used to AI being a more visible and more impactful part of our reality than it has been before.
Interview language(s): English, German

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Is AI coming for white-collar jobs? A psychology professor finds out the hard way

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Q&As A UBC psychology professor wondered whether AI was smart enough to handle some of his workload. He was astonished to discover it could. In a paper recently published in Psychological Methods, Dr. Friedrich Götz detailed how he used GPT-2, a precursor to ChatGPT, to develop a psychological test that performed as well as what psychologists currently use.

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Harvard Gazette - Will ChatGPT supplant us as writers, thinkers?

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Harvard Gazette - Will ChatGPT supplant us as writers, thinkers?

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Alvin Powell Harvard Staff Writer DateFebruary 14, 2023February 15, 2023

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Will ChatGPT replace human writers? Pinker weighs in.

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Psychologist says the chatbot is impressive — and may offer insights into the nature of human intelligence once it “stops making stuff up.”

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Policies/Comments for ChatGPT by other Canadian Universities

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Policies/Comments for ChatGPT by other Canadian Universities

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ChatGPT resources by other Canadian universities

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U Saskatchewan - Wondering what to do about ChatGPT?

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U Saskatchewan - Wondering what to do about ChatGPT?

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ChatGPT is a tool developed using artificial intelligence (AI) methods that was released in November 2022. It uses "large language models" and predictive technology to create and revise written products of many kinds. AI text generator tools are producing increasingly coherent responses that are difficult to distinguish from those produced by people.

Currently, it is free and accessed as a "research preview."  Subscription models have been introduced that provide access to more advanced features.  Speculation is that soon, this technology will appear in Microsoft products.

To use the ChatGPT service, you are required to set up an account with personal information such as an email address and phone number.

Input to ChatGPT is not protected by the Privacy Policy or the Terms of Use, and is used in providing and maintaining the service. This may mean that it is used in providing output to others. You should not enter personal, confidential, or proprietary information as input.

Inputting any substantial amount of copyrighted text into ChatGPT could constitute a copyright infringement if done without permission of the copyright owner.

The copyright status of AI-generated content is currently unclear. While many copyright scholars posit that the output cannot be protected by copyright, the ChatGPT Terms of Use include requirements and restrictions for use of the output (implying somewhat that it is copyright-protected). Further, output from the service could contain copyright-infringed text. The users of ChatGPT are responsible for the output and ensuring it does not violate any applicable law.

ChatGPT can be accessed via the website OpenAI.com. (Direct: https://chat.openai.com/auth/login)
*Often ChatGPT may say it is at capacity due to high demand.

If you'd rather not interact with the tool directly, you can search for demos on YouTube, including those more specific to your discipline or assessment types.

Try out the questions you might use on assignments or exams, see how well it does.

Interact with it and imagine you are a student in your course needing clarification on a key concept or topic. See how well it responds to a series of related questions.

Try it for your own work needs and personal interests.

Current limitations that have been noted include the following:

Some inaccuracy--but it does make things sound/read as factual including when it has the facts slightly or completely wrong.

Begins to repeat itself in longer responses and lacks "voice".

Current events from 2021 onward are not part of its training.

Biased content in that it has been trained on content that contains bias and cannot distinguish or make decisions about appropriateness.

Citation of sources can be incomplete, unreliable, or fabricated.

This tool and those like it will only get better.

This depends on what an instructor has indicated the authorized forms of assistance are and how a student presents the authorship of the assessments they submit.

Some relevant sections of the USask Academic Misconduct Regulations:

- Regarding unauthorized/unpermitted assistance: [P. 6, point g, (i)]
"Failure to observe any stated rule with regard to the procedures used in an examination, assessment, or an activity undertaken for academic credit where such a failure could result in the student gaining relatively greater credit"

- Regarding plagiarism: [P. 7, point l] States that plagiarism is

"the presentation of the work or idea of another in such a way as to give others the impression that it is the work or ideas of the presenter.

Adequate attribution is required. What is essential is that another person have no doubt which words or research results are the student's and which are drawn from other sources. Full explicit acknowledgement of the source of the material is required."

And, specifically, one example of plagiarism appears (ii)

"The verbatim use of oral or written material without adequate attribution"

Read this Educatus post: ChatGPT and Academic Misconduct Regulations

Journals and disciplinary communities are taking positions on ChatGPT and other tools (e.g., see what Nature provided as ground rules January 24, 2023) and providing formats for acceptable attribution (e.g., see MLA pre-ChatGPT guidance here February 6, 2019).

Check with journals commonly referenced in your field.

As an instructor, you can also develop a format that you will accept for your assignments. Share it with students so that they know what to do.

Educators are making intentional use of ChatGPT in their teaching and assessment.

You may find strategies are being shared in your specific disciplinary communities.

If you require use of ChatGPT in your course, do provide an alternative to setting up an account for students who do not want to share their email or phone number with a third-party service. An alternative, depending on how you are permitting or requiring students to use ChatGPT, is to provide them with the text from the tool directly.
Consider ways to require students to show how they used ChatGPT as part of their process.
Mintz (January, 2023) shares an approach to 500-word essays that must include four parts:

1. A detailed prompt input into ChatGPT.

2. The text that ChatGPT "wrote" in responses to the prompt.

3. An essay that builds on the ChatGPT foundation, supplemented with additional research that must be cited in a bibliography.

4. A list of the corrections, revisions, and additions that the student made in producing the reworked essay.

Incorporate what ChatGPT generates into the task.
Here are a few sample assessment tasks or questions:

Use AI to generate both elegant computer code and inefficient or incorrect code. Clarify how you know which is which and what caused the AI to generate each type.

Enter case specifics in an AI to generate a differential diagnosis. What details cause the AI to change its diagnosis? How is the logic the same or different than the logic for a professional use?

Ask the AI to generate a passage of text. Critique the passage based on the generalizations and stereotypes it reinforces.

Read this Educatus post: Will you allow ChatGPT?
Plus, 8 Ways to Engage AI Writers in Higher Education, shared by McKnight (October, 2022).

And, for even more ideas about how to use ChatGPT, see this resource.

Teach students about appropriate use. Show them exactly what you permit it to be used for and what you do not. Encourage students to ask you questions.

Use assignments where AI will have difficulty, for example:

create questions and use resources that are from 2022 onward as ChatGPT, at least at this time, is trained on 2021 and earlier data sets,

create questions that are rooted in the context of classroom discussion.

Set up more assessments to be completed in class and using in-class groups. This reduces the likelihood of access to unauthorized assistance of many kinds.

Ask for a first draft or scaffold the sections of major assignments to be submitted in stages . This help s students with their time management and may prevent last - minute academic misconduct of many kinds.

Explain the shortcomings of AI text generators and the learning-centred and ethical reasons you want their process and product for assessment to represent what they have learned, not what ChatGPT can do.

At this point, the use of AI-detectors on student work is discouraged. The quality of AI-detectors has not been demonstrated and there are issues related to their capacity to keep pace with advancements in AI-text generating tools.

To detect ChatGPT, watch for the kind of limitations noted in #4 above. For example,

You may identify absence of information from 2021 onward in an assignment.

You may spot check references since fabrication by ChatGPT has been a noted problem.

You may notice repetitiveness of language or sentence structure.

Do remember that these kinds of problems can appear in student work and not be due to ChatGPT. Talk with students about what you observe in their assignments.
Read the Educatus post: Talking with students about suspected plagiarism.

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ChatGPT is a tool developed using artificial intelligence (AI) methods that was released in November 2022. It uses "large language models" and predictive technology to create and revise written products of many kinds. AI text generator tools are producing increasingly coherent responses that are difficult to distinguish from those produced by people.

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Supporting Academic Integrity: Ethical Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education Information Sheet

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Supporting Academic Integrity: Ethical Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education Information Sheet

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Supporting Academic Integrity- Ethical Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education Information Sheet  

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Adapt or Resist? Harvard Business Publishing

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Adapt or Resist? Harvard Business Publishing

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ChatGPT and AI Text Generators_ Should Academia Adapt or Resist_ _ Harvard Business Publishing Education

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Dr. Nigmendra Narain, Western University

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Dr. Nigmendra Narain, Western University

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ChatGPT - Implications Pedagogy Countering