05 Apr ChatGPT : In Light of Students
Imagine an American student goes to China to learn Mandarin. Naturally, when in China, it is the best place to learn and practice the new language and improve the skills. As a beginner, naturally a student is reluctant to talk in Mandarin but he wishes go out grocery shopping. Now, instead of spending time with the locals and trying to practice Mandarin, he goes to a vending machine and buys his essentials.
ChatGPT is not much different from this vending machine. It is a chatbot which is a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), developed by the American AI research laboratory, OpenAI. It stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. From solving simple to more complicated codes to checking out the list of ingredients for your chicken steak, ChatGPT is the new assistant for you to carry out almost all your tasks. If you wish to know in which companies you should invest or you want to get an article on Spanish flu of 1919 or you are searching for a suitable bicycle track around you to bicycle with your friends, ChatGPT is there for you providing solutions to these problems with minimal effort from your end. Within less than a week since its breakthrough, ChatGPT had crossed more than a million users, faster than Netflix, YouTube, or any other website. Such an event is remarkable and something to know about.
A student’s life circumscribes around knowing and applying. When one attends a school, they learn new things such as science, computing, mathematics, languages, arts, and other skills which are helpful for them in their life. With constant practice of these, a student then focuses on his subject of interest and pursues it as their career. With the emerging AI technology such as ChatGPT, a student has now access to a much broader scope of knowledge with access to a whole new level of literature. This chatbot now holds potential to surpass all the search engines and imbibe into our lives completely. Even in such a preliminary phase, it has made a successful entrance into our lives and more students can now access this as it is free of cost. If someone needs to know more about the life of a musician and does not wish to search multiple websites to gather that information, they can just use ChatGPT and within seconds, they will get concise or detailed information depending upon their request. If a student wishes to know a complex equation in simpler terms with their definitions, diagrams, and other description, he can use the platform. To get creative ideas to celebrate the anniversary of their parents, ChatGPT can offer many ideas to you to the point where you yourself might be amazed by such an intensive research. Instead of spending much time unnecessarily on a trivial coding error, ChatGPT can be used to debug the errors and provide you the corrected code along with the reasons of those errors. A programmer can use the chatbot to write simpler codes so that they can spend more time on the complex parts of the codes and be efficient in their work. ChatGPT offers a whole lot of other features which are difficult to fit inside a short article.
Apart from this wide pool of resources, ChatGPT also provides us with a history of all the conversations which we had had with it in the past. It also provides us with a follow-up for those conversations. Hence, you do not have to worry about the previous errors you found in your code or the exact recipe of your vanilla cake which ChatGPT had guided you earlier.
But as described in the scenario in the beginning, a student even though has access to the vending machine (ChatGPT here) where they can save a lot of time from the conventional shopping, there are places where the growth of the student gets hampered as he forgets to actually apply and practice his Mandarin by talking to the local shopkeepers (practical knowledge from the books here). Every coin has two sides and so does ChatGPT. Even though ChatGPT is trained not to entertain requests which might be inappropriate for a user, it is still an ‘artificial’ intelligence and not an actual human being which can differentiate between what is appropriate and what is not. The chatbot also makes the user beware of the occasional incorrect responses to the questions or harmful instructions. As it is still in its preliminary phase, it is not completely up-to-date and does not have much knowledge of the world and events after 2021.
Even though such an AI platform is a boon to the students, it might hamper their growth too when used inappropriately. Instances have occurred when students have stopped using their creativity and have completely relied on ChatGPT to get their schools essays done. Instead of debugging their codes, students are using ChatGPT to work that out. Students are using the platform to paraphrase the articles written by their friends and hence escaping from all that hard work of spending time on writing them on their own. They are willing to fall into the trap of plagiarizing and escaping rather than working out on the problems independently. Such technology, which can be a great tool to learn, when used in an inappropriate fashion, can lead to some detrimental effects on a student’s mind.
With all these features, ChatGPT is a great tool for society if used with utmost care. The world is looking for ways to improve this platform so that malpractices can be minimized. We are in such an era where innovative technologies are being furnished each year. A lot of things are being expected from ChatGPT and we should hope that this only becomes a boon to society, especially to students, and not a curse.
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