ChatGPT has been accessed thousands of times across Scottish universities, according to new data from Freedom of Information requests, intensifying the uncertainty around the involvement of AI in education.
As reported by The Times, Glasgow University alone had 150,647 ChatGPT connections from their campus Wi-Fi networks since May of this year.
Abertay University recorded 19,101 visits to the site over the early summer, and Robert Gordon University registered an average 2,434 visits per month to ChatGPT over their networks.
This data only reflects the number of times ChatGPT was accessed over university Wi-Fi networks, so students may be accessing the it in greater number when using other connections. Further, the technology may be accessed not just by Scottish university students, but by staff as well.
It is no secret that ChatGPT has been employed by university students — it was revealed by The Tab that Russell Group universities recorded over a million visits to ChatGPT in the first two months of its release.
Since the AI chatbot’s release to the wider public, academic institutions have been grappling with what the new technology means for essay writing, grading, and education as a whole.
The startling success of the online chatbot, developed by OpenAI, has seen countless debates concerning its proper use around education, work, innovation, and art.
ChatGPT has been known to develop incorrect yet confident sounding answers to queries, create fake references to papers, and dispel conspiracy theories if provided certain prompts.
The resource can write essays, poems, and songs, stumping educators on how they can continue to assess students’ work with the possibility they leveraged an AI chatbot to create it.
But every use of ChatGPT is not the same — students may use it to explain a concept, answer a simple query, or provide an outline or structure of an essay. Others may use it to produce fully-formed coursework or edit their work — each specific use only leaves more questions into when it is and is not appropriate to employ AI technology for education.
Scottish universities, in light of this, have taken various approaches to the emerging technology.
It was revealed by The Tab that the University of Glasgow, for instance, has investigated four students for using ChatGPT, saying these cases counted as academic misconduct in the form of cheating or plagiarising.
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However, the university also released guidance on AI use for assessments in July of this year, saying that “rather than seek to prohibit students’ use of these tools, we want to support students in learning how to use them effectively, ethically, critically, and transparently.”
The institution went on to stipulate that students should not use AI tools to generate content and submit it as their own, but should rather work to understand how AI could be used, and how to acknowledge its use.
The University of Edinburgh provides similar guidance, stating: “Be aware that if you use AI tools (such as ChatGPT or others) to generate an assignment (or part of an assignment) and submit this as if it were your own work, this will be regarded as academic misconduct and treated as such.”
But this still leaves a bit of wiggle room in the everyday life of a student — what if a student gets ChatGPT to edit their essay instead of a friend, what if ChatGPT is used to produce a bibliography or recommend readings, or provide an essay structure?
Universities are importantly, not instituting outright bans of the technology, and are instead attempting to warn students of ChatGPT’s limits while acknowledging its many benefits.
The University of Aberdeen, which had investigated some students for academic misconduct over their use of ChatGPT, provided guidance that even encouraged academic staff to have students use the AI chatbot in some assessments by critiquing answers the bot generates.
Sites like TurnItIn, which typically check essays for plagiarism, have launched new programmes to check if essays were developed by ChatGPT or other large language models. However, editing a ChatGPT- generated essay can make it unidentifiable by plagiarism checks.
The guidance across universities leaves much up to the discretion of educators, but ultimately accepts the involvement of ChatGPT and other language models in academic work, though to varying degrees.
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