:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/grupoclarin/L2ZMSU6IJRCPVET6HXIYMI2MX4.jpg "For students who use ChatGPT, the AI is just another classmate or a private teacher")
When the Open AI company opened the beta version of ChatGPT for the mass public in November 2022, it had one million users in five days and one hundred million users in two months, which indicates that up to now -and provisionally- it is the technology which had the fastest adoption in history.
Every time a disruptive technology appears, there are the so-called apocalyptic and integrated ones: those who are against it and see all the possible risks and those who see the possibility of using them as virtual assistants or co-designers.
“One more classmate” who provides a point of view or a “private teacher” with whom to clear up doubts were some of the definitions given by students of different educational levels when asked about how they use ChatGPT and other artificial intelligences (AI) and the debates that arise in the classrooms from its recent irruption.
For students who use ChatGPT, the AI is just another classmate or a private teacher
”It’s good to use ChatGPT as a new source of information, as one more partner to develop, optimize. We cannot have some mates with the chat, but we can use his point of view, he has a fairly impartial look,” Mateo Amaya, a law student at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), told Télam.
”ChatGPT helps me unite concepts. For Theory of the State we asked him ‘we need a concept of democracy that in turn takes the monarchy and parliamentarism as a reference’ and he gave us a response of four paragraphs, of which we chose only one, the one that served us the most ”, Mateo told about his link with AI in his career.
The impact of ChatGPT in higher education was “immediate and divisive”, warned UNESCO in the Quick Start Guide ‘ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education’, published last April, and added that “although its applications are wide, many universities have already banned it for fear of plagiarism by the students”.
Another UBA student, but from the Graphic Design degree, Aldana Pájaro (26), contributed in dialogue with Télam: “It is good that students use AI, but not that it uses us.” The young woman, who has five subjects left to finish her degree, recently began incorporating Photoshop’s ChatGPT and Generative Fill beta as “tools” that give her inputs to solve practical tasks.
“I was kind of reluctant to use AI, but I’m amazed at what it generates in images and saves me hours of work,” she said.
Regarding the possibility of “plagiarism”, the student said that teachers ask them “not to carry final projects done with AI” and that “they realize if something was done with AI, especially if typography or people are used” .
Voiceover student Amparo López (18) told Télam that she used ChatGPT “only twice”, but she does not want to abuse these tools that at the moment cause her “fear” because she knows “very little” about them.
”In addition to the search that I have to do every week for news, I told ChatGPT ‘you are a radio news editor and I need you to tell me the most important news’, and it was given to me in that format -although the Available information from the chat goes until 2021-. He also speaks to you in different vocabularies. I told him ‘you are an operator who is going to explain to me what the output of a microphone is like in the output of such a type’ and he explained it to me”.
On the use of AI in his career, he reflected: “If AI tells me what I have to think, think, look for or find, it loses itself, that margin of decision about what I want to say.”
The fifth-year student at the Oscar Aníbal Flores middle school from the Buenos Aires town of Tortuguitas Ezequiel Andrada (17) said that he uses ChatGPT “a lot” to “resolve all kinds of doubts about any subject.”
“In other generations you had to go to the library or talk to a private teacher, but today we have it at our fingertips”, he assessed and explained: “I use it in subjects such as Organizational Project and Literature, when I am lost with some point, if I need to clarify any doubt quickly and efficiently, to have another point of view or receive an explanation”.
The teenager discovered the chat by his own means on the Internet and delved into it by watching forums and videos “to find out how to use it as another study tool.” To use it, he recommended addressing the chat with “prompt words” which, in computing, are called ‘prompts’, such as; ‘I want you to summarize, write, explain’ and indicated that “if the question is written correctly, the information will be more precise”.
However, he clarified that he does not usually trust 100% in the data provided by the AI and that he seeks prior information before conversing with the chat.