Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) -

There has been a surge in development of Artificial intelligence lately, with the ability to write, create art and write computer code. Its impact on education is being closely monitored as concerns about academic integrity and the responsible use of AI continue to grow. NewsSource8′s Brian Bouchard has the story.

“ChatGPT is pretty new technology, it emerged in the later part of last year.”

Doctor Rafiul Hassan, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maine at Presque Isle says since it’s release to the public, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, tools like ‘ChatGPT’ have opened a doorway of possibilities. The AI is built on a language model of more than 570 Gigabytes of text data sourced from web pages, books, news articles and more, and provides responses and solutions to questions or problems asked of it. ChatGPT can write essays, jokes and even computer programs.

“I encourage my students to use ChatGPT because I believe that, ChatGPT, at this phase cannot provide a solution to a complex problem”

Hassan says its up to the students to build upon what the AI provides for information, taking what is relevant and useful and discarding any incorrect or useless information. While Hassan encourages use of the AI to further his student’s understanding of programming languages, the potential exists for students to use this tool to violate academic integrity.

“We’ve already had discussions about how this will impact our policies and our enforcement of our policies and ensuring students are aware of this. I mean, we have infractions of academic integrity every semester, probably every week, and that happened before ChatGPT”

UMPI President Raymond Rice says the concerns being raised by academia are similar to concerns raised during the birth of the modern internet.

“The internet which exploded later when I was in graduate school gave rise to the same questions. I remember when I first became a teacher at the college level, things like Wikipedia started to appear and there was all kind of concern about “is this going to damage our ability for students to think for themselves?”

Rice says while they have not had any direct examples of students using ChatGPT to undermine academic integrity thus far, if and when they do, the university will address it on a case by case basis. Next time, we’ll put the AI to the test in a one on one interview.

Brian Bouchard, NewsSource8

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