The ChatGPT Conundrum at UNC-Chapel Hill
March 2023 • Feature Writing @ UNC
Each Tuesday and Thursday at 10:45 a.m., UNC-Chapel Hill professor Todd Ochoa parks his bike outside of Mitchell Hall, walks up two flights of stairs and randomly distributes 30 name cards around Mitchell 211’s classroom tables. Ochoa looks like a college professor. He has curly gray hair, sports rimless glasses and short-sleeve button up shirts and nurses a paper cup of water while he teaches. When class begins at 11 a.m., he assigns each table group a small portion of our weekly readings to review and eventually report back to the class-wide discussion. Ochoa listens eagerly to each student, pacing from the dry-erase board at the front of the classroom to the students who are seated in the back. The norms that Ochoa established at the beginning of the semester–that each student come to class prepared to actively discuss the reading–ensure that we are all engaged for the entire hour and fifteen minutes we have together twice each week.
Ochoa’s Religious Things course deals with discussions of sacred and “enchanted” objects. A sacred object, he said, embodies the potential for the unknown and is often prohibited. For example, a childhood toy that has human qualities is sacred in a way that is similar to a religious object thought to be connected to God. In our discussions of the works of philosophers like Karl Marx and Georg Hegel, the 30 of us work together to break down their most basic ideas. In Religious Studies courses in particular, working through difficult texts is a satisfying foundation of learning. Isn’t staring at photocopies of philosophical texts until frustratingly shutting your laptop in the early hours of the morning, still unsure of what whatever the scholar-of-the-week was going on about, what it means to obtain a liberal arts education?
On January 24, our class prepared to discuss French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve’s writing on desire and objectification. Ochoa had previously assigned us to have a three question long conversation with ChatGPT, Microsoft partner group OpenAI’s highly developed “large-language model,” about Kojeve’s work. The assignment was just an experiment, he said, inspired by an ongoing debate he’d been having with colleagues related to AI’s effectiveness in the classroom. It was also relevant to our course–isn’t AI, which is both useful and terrifying, simultaneously awe and fear-provoking, sacred in its own right?
Without trying the technology, Ochoa said, his colleagues had written ChatGPT off as the newest cheating fad. He decided to embrace the possibilities ChatGPT could bring to the classroom. In our discussion that day, it was almost as if each student had engaged in extensive conversations with a knowledgeable peer or TA about the assigned reading before coming to class. Essentially, we had.
When I asked it about its own educational history, ChatGPT told me that it “did not attend school in the traditional sense.” ChatGPT doesn’t wear rimmed glasses or button ups, but that it will drastically change education is inevitable. Teachers and administrators all over the world realize it’s the sort of technology to which they must respond. Some, who see it as apocalyptic, have banned AI entirely from school Wi-Fi servers. Others, like Ochoa, have decided that since the widespread use of ChatGPT and AI among students is unavoidable, either use it to attempt to inspire learning or to teach their students to understand its downsides, which includes its lack of citations. “ChatGPT and other language models have the potential to change education in a number of ways,” ChatGPT told me in our conversation it eventually titled “AI in Education.” “However, it's important to note that while ChatGPT and other language models have the potential to greatly enhance education, they should not replace human teachers entirely.”
Vikram Puri, a UNC-CH student studying biology, enrolled in Ochoa’s religion course to fulfill a general education requirement. He originally created an OpenAI account, like me, to complete Ochoa’s assignment. As he messed around, he realized that he could also use ChatGPT in his STEM classes. For Puri, ChatGPT has functioned as a means to “dumb-down” dense readings, whether they be from his biology textbook or our assigned religion readings.
“It’s a lot in a short amount of space,” Puri said, referring to dense readings. “I think ChatGPT takes a little bit of that pressure away. If I don’t understand it, I can ask ChatGPT.”
While ChatGPT helps Puri work through dense texts, he remains cautious of its tendency to confidently answer a question, regardless of whether it knows its answer to be factually correct.
“I’ve definitely encountered ChatGPT mistakes,” Puri said. Before he trusts ChatGPT’s biology explanations, he makes sure they align with those in his biology textbooks. UNC-CH faculty are worried that, unlike Puri, their students will too easily accept ChatGPT’s word as correct.
UNC-CH’s Center for Faculty Excellence hosted a series of three conversations, open to any UNC-CH faculty, teaching assistant or student leader, called “Conversations on Teaching: AI and ChatGPT.” The third and final conversation segment was hosted by CFE’s Doug James on March 8. James asked the 21 participants to each think about ways that ChatGPT could be useful in their own classrooms.
Katharine Henry, a TA in the English department, noted in the Zoom chat that, “ChatGPT may require us to value creativity more highly since ChatGPT isn’t as good on its own with that.”
Dana Riger, an assistant professor in the School of Education, created a flowchart of steps that she thinks should be used to navigate effectively integrating ChatGPT into the classroom. Before professors assign their students to use AI to assist with their understanding of class materials, they should remove assignments that AI could complete and paste their exam questions and assignment prompts into the system. Regardless of the ideal learning experience she created, ChatGPT has weaseled its way into the classroom. I’m not afraid to admit that I can be a bit of a snoop. If there’s a screen or paper with words in front of me, I’m going to read it. Distracted easily, I notice when my classmates are playing “2048” or doing the New York Times mini crossword instead of focusing. In recent classes, I watch my classes navigate to chat.openai.com and ask the chat the same question a professor just posed.
Even as I worked on this article in a cafe, my friend, Mary Katherine Thompson, paused her essay-writing to show me the “new website” she’d just discovered. With a simple question, ChatGPT had given her five potential sources she could use for her essay. Later, I opened Snapchat to discover that the app had just implemented a “personal AI sidekick” to whom I could “Say hello now.”
I asked my own ChatGPT account, momentarily closing the conversation we were having about my Religious Things midterm, to tell it to “write a 30-word conclusion for a feature article about how chatgpt is affecting higher education.”
In conclusion, ChatGPT is transforming higher education by providing students and educators with an intelligent virtual assistant that can enhance learning and teaching processes, ultimately leading to a more efficient and effective academic experience.