An assistant professor at USF is using results from his new study on artificial intelligence chatbots to rework how he’s assigning homework in his class. The rise of chatbots has raised concern among teachers and students alike. If these programs can churn entire written papers—then how are teachers going to sort out what’s original and what’s AI?
Luckily Matthew Kessler, assistant professor in the Department of World Languages, has rearranged his course to combat the oncoming AI storm.
“For instance, instead of asking students to produce short summaries on different readings, something that ChatGPT can do quite easily, I’m giving my students more integrated, hands-on assignments that ask them to blend traditional academic readings with personalized, experiential learning projects,” said Kessler.
For example, in one of the assignments, Kessler’s students will be required to use a mobile app of their choice to learn a foreign language and document the ways they use the app to immerse themselves in the language for five weeks.
Getting beat by AI chatbots
These changes are inspired by Kessler’s new research just published in the ScienceDirect journal Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. The research revealed even experts from the world’s top linguistic journals have difficulty differentiating AI from human-generated writing. Kessler asked 72 experts in linguistics to review research abstracts to determine if they were written by AI or humans.
“We thought if anybody is going to be able to identify human-produced writing, it should be people in linguistics who’ve spent their careers studying patterns in language and other aspects of human communication,” Kessler said.
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The findings revealed otherwise. Despite the experts’ attempts to use rationales to judge the writing, such as identifying certain linguistic and stylistic features, they were largely unsuccessful. They had an overall positive identification rate of less than 39 percent.
“What was more interesting was when we asked them why they decided something was written by AI or a human,” Kessler said. “They shared very logical reasons, but again and again, they were not accurate or consistent.”
Outsmarting ChatGPT
Based on this, Kessler and Casal concluded ChatGPT can write short genres just as well as most humans. In some cases, AI writes better than humans, given that AI typically does not make grammatical errors.
The silver lining for human authors lies in longer forms of writing. “For longer texts, AI has been known to hallucinate and make up content. Making it easier to identify that it was generated by AI,” Kessler said.
USF sophomore Max Ungrey is taking Kessler’s course through. He says he occasionally uses ChatGPT before raising his hand with a question in class.
“Obviously ChatGPT is detrimental if used as a replacement for learning, rather than a tool. I’ve absolutely noticed changes in school due to ChatGPT. Both due to my own use and the use of others,” Ungrey said. “I can certainly see myself using ChatGPT and other language models in day-to-day work. For example, some web browsers have built in AI which can summarize large bodies of text, and I think I will end up using tools like that.”
Kessler hopes this will start a conversation to establish the ethics and guidelines when using AI in research and education.