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by seby
Great thread. The below is a copy of an email I send to our DVC last week. This is from the perspective of someone working in academia:
I am just so excited about ChatGPT. Not for reasons that most are, but still, I can barely contain myself. Honestly, I feel like I have been waiting for this moment. I know that this sounds a bit silly but I am being entirely sincere. Please bear with me and hear me out.
There is a threat to academic integrity posed by large language model-based generative AI such as ChatGPT. This much is obvious. If some students are tempted by and prepared to plagiarise content from the internet (and they are), or prepared to engage in contract cheating (and they are), then some students will be tempted by and engage in acts of academic misconduct enabled by ChatGPT and its cognates. Again, this much is obvious. What we might do to mitigate it is not.
There is a terrific opportunity here. It is wonderful, and it turns on relationships. Academic integrity is only one type of many. It sits next to personal integrity, and is an instance of professional integrity more generally. It will include pedagogical and research integrity as its members. Others might include emotional integrity, artistic integrity, social integrity, managerial integrity, and more.
I do not know the taxonomy of integrity in detail, but I do know that it is always founded upon a relationship of some sort - between a person and some other thing. Sometimes the other thing is another person or persons. Other times it is responsibilities, other times office, and so on. The point here being only that anything that threatens such relationships will threaten the integrity founded upon them.
Academic integrity is founded upon relationships between members of the academic community, and this includes our students of course. What might threaten these relationships? Rather a lot of things I think! Good relationships require vigilance after all. But what I have in mind here is standardisation. Standardisation threatens these relationships because standardisation is, by definition, impersonal. And now to close the circle finally - standardisation begets alienation, and alienation eats away at our interpersonal relationships.
Here then is the opportunity afforded to us by ChatGPT and its ilk as I see it. Our opportunity is to bring discussions exploring authenticity into the daylight. It is to recognise and articulate the dangers posed by the alienating service-model understanding of the University. It is to reflect on the real, relationship-building and integrity-preserving meaning of authenticity. It is to finally emerge from lazy post-modern semantic-nihilism, and Resurrect the Author.
The opportunity more broadly is to reflect upon our pedagogical practice, minding constantly that we are creating persons by virtue of what we ask them to do. We are what we do - along with our reasons for so doing - so what we ask of our students will create the persons into which they turn.
Now that ChatGPT lives among us, we have reason to bring to the fore and cultivate those aspects of our students and ourselves that cannot be automated or standardised, and I cannot wait!