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The chatbot GPT has been reviewed as both a threat to the independence of student-learning and as a significant advance in the development of the communication of knowledge on the internet. I was puzzled by a report in the media that someone claimed that he owed his medical degree to the existence of this AI form. I have no medical training but I do have a philosophical training and decided to test the chatGPT’ knowledge of philosophical matters by asking it some difficult questions such as Is Freud a hylomorphic theorist? , is Kant a Hylomorphic Philosopher?. What is Consciousness? What is areté. psuché, diké eudaimonia, logos, etc. The responses were surprisingly good and the quality went far beyond what one can find on Wikipedia or indeed in standard Encyclopedias. In some cases it surpassed the kind of response one can get from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. My experiment is ongoing but I am pleasantly surprised with the results thus far and am continuing the experiment with the newly formed hypothesis that this form of AI could be a significant aid in higher education if used in the way one would use encyclopedias(not to plagiarise the content but to learn from the content) This of course places a great responsibility on Universities and Schools to develop tools to ensure that plagiarism does not occur. The shifting of responsibility for detecting plagiarism onto the lecturer/ teacher is a possible solution but would mean a huge burden on their time which in turn demands a rethinking of the role of the teacher/lecturer. Such a shift can only occur if there is some means of checking whether the content has come directly from the chatbot without significant alteration(showing evidence of the students/pupils learning process). The problem with developing such a tool would seem to lie in the ability to formulate a set of questions which would exhaust the possible responses to the topic or question at issue. My view on the question as to whether one could use such a tool (chatgpt) to illegitimately obtain a Philosophical degree one does not deserve is that the student will not have access to the tool in examinations and as long as there is a balance between examination and essay assessment there ought not to be a problem. Given the doctoral requirements that a doctoral thesis must advance the boundaries of currently existing knowledge of the area investigated I am not worried about doctoral theses appearing which have been written by Chatgpt.
A PS relating to my ongoing experiment. I asked the Chat bot why I should believe the responses given that these responses are that of a machine. The chatbot accurately referred to developers of the algorithms and data and claimed also to be “trained”. I asked whether the chatbot considered the responses to be its own and once again the chatbot referred to developers and trainers. When I asked whether robots can be trained an error message appeared asking me to contact the help-line. The programmers of the bot have a problem here because if the bot is artificially intelligent it ought minimally be capable of learning(a condition of understanding) and not just “learning” in a metaphorical sense. Learning is defined as the facilitation of human psychological powers so that a type of behaviour is present that was not present before. Persons own these powers which are organismically and not mechanically based. I then asked if the chatbot understands its own responses and it claimed that is is capable of understanding via processing of data and input There is a famous thought experiment by the philosopher John Searle that proves that a computer is not capable of understanding. Perhaps the term “artificial intelligence” was too hastily adopted and we ought to be looking for some other terms to accurately describe this interesting phenomenon that we have created–terms that contain no anthropomorphic connotations. #students #learning #ai #training #development #communication #quality #content #media #highereducation #schools #medical #teacher #universities #chatgpt #plagiarism #philosophy #learning #understanding