On February 18th, the DTU School of Engineering and Technology held a “ChatGPT: Opportunities and Challenges in Higher Education” seminar, under the chairmanship of Associate Professor Ha Dac Binh, Rector of the DTU School of Engineering and Technology. Important ChatGPT issues were discussed, relating to its benefits to higher education and the challenges faced.
Associate Professor Ha Dac Binh
Associate Professor Ha Dac Binh said: “The recent birth of ChatGPT in the field of AI is a major breakthrough. However, the system is so far still unavailable in Vietnam, although many here are looking for ways to access it. Because its use in education is highly controversial, we will try to clarify the opportunities and challenges that ChatGPT presents if we integrate it to exploit our current AI applications more effectively.”
Associate Professor Ha Dac Binh explained that ChatGPT, (Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer), is a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is a massive 570 GB database of books, articles and websites, which allows the system to generate text in a similar way to human beings. So far, it contains about 300 billion words, which allows it to answer simple questions and, at the same time, solve complex coding problems. Within two months of its release, the system has 100 million active users, and has become the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched.
Attendees
Presenters highlighted some of the benefits of ChatGPT and its use in customer service, personal assistant applications, automated customer support and more. ChatGPT enables users to expand their knowledge without a mentor or assessor. However, lecturers can meanwhile provide the same timely and constructive feedback on student strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement as usual.
However, there are also some significant risks using ChatGPT in education because it can encourage academic misconduct, such as plagiarism, limiting students from developing their own critical and analytical thinking abilities. ChatGPT has no emotion, personality or common sense and therefore lacks a true understanding of the complexity of human language and conversation. Consequently, it is important to analyze the potential drawbacks of integrating ChatGPT and ensure, if installed, it will truly guarantee high quality education and prevent abuse.
Several suggestions were offered at the seminar, including requesting students to complete a given assignment in class instead of at home and developing software to verify information and detect plagiarism.
(Media Center)