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ChatGPT, write me a CEKU article

Picture of Maisarah Abdullah

Maisarah Abdullah

When she’s not contemplating life choices, Maisarah is browsing through easy-to-cook uni meals since the UK ones are just too bland for her tastebuds. Cili padi? A necessity.

Artificial intelligence seems closer to fact than fiction as chatbots like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. ChatGPT is a chatbot that does more than your average school work. From diagnosing a medical disease to writing songs and poems, providing cooking recipes, planning your dream European holiday, identifying bugs in code, and explaining the errors, ChatGPT has defied the norm and become a symbol of the endless possibilities that artificial intelligence can offer. But as we delve deeper into the mechanics of it, we begin to assess several factors of this revolutionary generative AI chatbot that induces excitement but also fear-mongering and serious concerns. 

 

The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence 

Before we get into the philosophical aspects, it is crucial to understand how ChatGPT works. ChatGPT is more than your friendly companion Google which simply acts as an internet engine. Being hailed as a technological breakthrough, ChatGPT has solved a problem that has long served as a distant dream for engineers: generating human-like language. 

With an average of 25 million daily visitors, the chatbot has won the hearts of people worldwide as it serves as a humungous data set used to form a deep learning neural network where human-like responses are being produced, and it even has the ability to predict what text should come next in any given sentence. Going beyond the capabilities of a normal human brain, it can instantly blurt out text in more than 50 languages, including Essperanta, Zulu, and Kannada. This intelligent chatbot’s power gives students an easy way out of their assignments and tests, ultimately plunging educators into panic mode.

 

The End of Originality? 

Serious concerns are being flagged when students gradually begin to develop reliance on ChatGPT, especially in matters such as essay writing, which can be seen as counterproductive to educators. 

One of the most important features of essay writing is the means of thinking; part and parcel of writing includes thoroughly researching a topic by assessing the veracity of different sources you come across on the internet, and supplementing your research with your authentic experiences to ultimately take a position you believe is the best choice. However, ChatGPT completely strips these creative processes away from you as the action of scouring the internet is being deduced to a summarisation. If this problem persists, it would lead to an internet wide-echo chamber of AI regurgitation where chatbots would compete in an endless cycle of homogenisation and repetition. 

 

The Hiccups of ChatGPT

Nevertheless, no matter how impressive its functions may be from a technical standpoint, it is easy for students to be swayed away by its features and lose sight of its crucial flaws. Essentially, using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, ChatGPT only reflects information that already exists on the internet. 

However, a lot of what has been presented on the internet can be untrue as information ranges from opinion-based articles you stumble upon a teenager’s blog or an academic paper being published by an esteemed professor. ChatGPT has no way of differentiating this and instead gives both sources equal weightage, thus allowing for “chatbot hallucination”. This is when chatbots “hallucinate” non-facts that it pronounces with perfect confidence, insisting on those falsehoods when queried.

 

Can ChatGPT Exist within the Malaysian Education System?

Even with its flaws, there is no denying that ChatGPT is one of the most powerful chatbots of the century. With technology evolving education in many ways, the first step to tackle it is for educators to acknowledge the widespread of artificial intelligence, and inevitable and for better or worse, the technology is here to stay. 

The Malaysian education system needs to deviate from traditional assessments based on testing students’ memory. Instead, Malaysian teachers should embrace the opportunities ChatGPT presents itself and herald a new era of greater innovation, productivity, equality, and critical thinking in the Malaysian education landscape. Assessment of a student’s progress should not be surmised into an exam paper that defines them for the rest of their lives. Schools should implement diverse ways of assessment which keep cheaters at bay such as their participation rate in classrooms, and replacing take-home exams with group work presentations, and oral interviews. 

ChatGPT can also assist a student in their learning process. For example, instead of having a conventional debate by splitting students into two teams, let the students debate the chatbot. ChatGPT has access to a vast amount of information and can provide students with valuable insights and perspectives. This trains students to interact with AI models and coax a helpful response out of one. 

Furthermore, ChatGPT can be a teacher’s best friend. There would no longer be overworked teachers as ChatGPT can significantly reduce a teacher’s administrative work by making comprehensive lesson plans, with details down to lesson objectives and procedures, so teachers can focus on what truly matters—the actual teaching. 

 

Conclusion 

Similar to writing a CEKU article, no matter how advanced these AI chatbots get, they can never replace your spark of writing and your distinctive voice influenced by the experiences and the environment you surround yourself with. 

Yes, ChatGPT can write an article about World Economics, Culture and Politics that is grammatically and factually correct, but it will never be able to replicate the creativity, originality and nuance that are the characteristics of human writing. 

 

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