Curveball or game changer? ChatGPT, AI tools under watch on Canadian campuses

When ChatGPT emerged last fall, reaction to the new artificial intelligence (AI) tool ranged from wonder and curiosity to consternation and panic — including among school officials already concerned with cheating and academic misconduct in our online age. 

Now, about two months later, a wave of professors and academic integrity experts are sharing more measured reactions to developer OpenAI's ChatGPT bot, which can quickly spit out human-like writing, computer code and more based on training from billions of samples from the web. 

They're checking out the bot themselves, raising it with colleagues and even bringing it into classrooms. Some call this a teachable moment: both for students and for professors, as a reminder to regularly re-evaluate new technologies and how they assess student learning.

For academic colleagues who "do a lot of thinking about the best way to teach and to help students learn in a digitally mediated space," there's no panic about ChatGPT since it's simply the latest in a progression of tech already on their radar, says Luke Stark, a Western University assistant professor of information and media studies. 

"ChatGPT is just one of many technological curveballs that higher education has had to deal with over the last few years," noted Stark, who researches the history, ethics and social implications of AI, machine learning and similar technologies. 

"I see it as an opportunity for all of us to be aware of the new things that we can do with technology and also the ways that this will impact our students."

When it opened to the public last fall, Stark raised ChatGPT in his classes and it's a move he encourages peers to do as well. 

"Do a little research yourself and then bring it up in class. Make it clear to the folks in front of you that you know about these systems… you know that somebody might be using them and make it a teachable moment about the way that technology can shape discourse, language, writing," he said.

"The key thing is to be engaged [and] honest with your students, to remind them that they want to be here. They want to be learning." 

Liane Gabora also told her classes about ChatGPT last fall and, after diving right into testing it alongside her students, the psychology professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan campus admits her initial feelings were a mix of amazement and concern. 

After tinkering, getting used to and discovering some limits of the bot, however, Gabora is now exploring what new opportunities it may provide when used for engaging assignments that encourage students' creativity and critical thinking. 

"They're having fun with [ChatGPT assignments]. They're playing with it. They're exploring it… They're testing the boundary conditions. They're trying all these jail-breaking techniques for getting out of the kind of default restraints," she explained. 

Gabora did first preface to her students that UBC administration is fully aware of ChatGPT — and new software that detects AI-generated essays as well, she pointed out. However, she thinks the way forward is to incorporate new tools like this. 

"We can't go backwards, right? It's here with us and it's going to stay."