Florish Charles
“If not for Wikipedia, google and copy and paste, I would not have graduated.” These were the words of a graduating student of one of the tertiary institutions in Nigeria. This statement makes obvious the fact that a large number of students (especially those in tertiary institutions) have come to depend on the internet not as a means of obtaining relevant information and learning but as a medium that provides easy access to peoples’ intellectual properties for plagiarism which subsequently fuels the collapse of copyright laws.
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Note that Google and Wikipedia do not directly dish out free information, they basically only give suggestions for websites and journals that carry traces of your search and sometimes it is herculean to find the exact topic of your research. However, students find their way around these websites and do not even bother to go over the answers before copying these answers word for word. And slowly, but with steadiness, these technologies have eaten deep into the fabric of the student populace and planted the seed of laziness and nonchalance and not many students are left with the enthusiasm to study and come up with answers to questions no matter how easy or complex those questions might be. One would have thought that the situation could not get any worse. However, with the advent of ChatGPT which not only gives accurate answers to questions, but does so with so much ease, the flames of students’ laziness have been fanned into a ravaging fire. In an article published by Clare Aririahu on “10 reasons why Nigerian Graduates are Unemployed and Unemployable” she noted that students are apathetic to education in Nigeria and a larger percent of students see education as a means to the end which means they are interested in the money-making benefits of education, but not interested in possessing the skills that would enable them to make the money in the end. This article was written before the release of ChatGPT and students were already apathetic and now there is a sure way to fuel this apathy.
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Now you can be given assignment questions as easy as writing a report on an excursion you embarked on, and the next thing you know someone says just use ChatGPT. Students have lost interest in reading for exams because they have so much confidence that ChatGPT would provide accurate answers in the exam hall and all they need to do is phrase the questions properly. And one begins to wonder if this generation has thinking in mind. Perhaps they are only motivated by the need to get a certificate and subsequently a job without really learning or carrying out any cognitive reasoning. Very recently, a story came up about a judge deciding whether to sanction two lawyers who blamed ChatGPT for tricking them into using fictitious legal cases in a court filing in the United States. What really is ChatGPT and what can it do that makes it a dangerous tool in the hands of students?
ChatGPT, in full Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer, a natural language processing AI Chatbot driven by AI technology developed from open AI, an American company is a software that allows a user to ask it questions using conversational, or natural language. It was released on November 30, 2022. According to Britannica, the release of ChatGPT immediately disturbed academics, journalists, and others because of the concern that it was almost impossible to distinguish human-from ChatGPT-generated writing.
Language models produce text based on the probability for a word to occur based of previous words in the sequence. By being trained on about 45 terabytes of text from the internet, the GPT-3 language model used by ChatGPT calculates that same sequences of words are more likely to occur than others. For example, “the cat sat on the mat” is more likely to occur in English than “sat the the mat cat on” and thus would be more likely to appear in the ChatGPT response. Some of the most popular tasks ChatGPT can perform are composing essays, writing emails, creating inventive creative stories and generating programming code.
Perhaps the most eye-catching feature of this new technology is that it provides different answers to one question, which varies from user to user. But to what end? And in as much as technology should be welcomed with open arms, is it okay for humans to abandon things like reasoning to machines? What then becomes of the human race? According to a publication by TIMESOFINDIA.COM relying heavily on ChatGTP for learning (as is the case of students in tertiary institutions) may make students overly dependent on technology and hinder their ability to think critically, solve problems independently, and develop essential skills. Think for a moment; what happens when you leave a padlock locked for a very long time? It becomes rusted and difficult to open. The same thing happens to the human brain if it is left unused for a long time. It gets use to being untouched and then limits itself to basic thinking and finds it difficult to move beyond daily routine.
According to a research made by Utah State University, “regular use of brain stimulating activities is actually building a healthier brain.” This research also shows that people who work with more intellectually stimulating jobs are continually building new brain connections, and using existing brain connections in their everyday life.
This does not mean that one should over-exert oneself. It simply means that the brain needs a constant surge of intellectually tasking activities in order for it to stay healthy. These activities could be learning new information, and processing that information on a deeper level, reading books and articles in a new genre, and watching documentaries while discussing its complexities with friends. Depending solely on Artificial Intelligence does not only reduce our abilities to come up with solutions to problems on our own, it also keeps the brain dormant which is unhealthy.
Although there are softwares that check against the use of artificial intelligence, how many tertiary institutions can afford to go through the process of cross-checking student’s answers with plagiarism checker software for AI generated answers. In the end, students that are turned out into the society for employment have poor cognitive reasoning abilities and little or no problem-solving skill which makes them unemployable.
Substantially, I recommend this as a great article. There’s a need for our youths to equip themselves on how to develop great insight that would contribute to a safer future than depending on AI. More grace to the author.
This is a wonderful piece of publication, the author is worthy of commendations for this great insight and great reasons why our universities are turning out unemployable and less cognitive students in the recent times. The managers of our institutions of higher learning should seriously look into this article and find out what needs to be done in order to check this unfortunate situation in our high institutions. Kudos to the author once again.