Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and Beyond for Faculty

Beal University's Updated Academic Dishonesty Policy. 6/6/24

• Academic Dishonesty Academic honesty is essential in student conduct. An academic honesty violation includes, but is not limited to, cheating, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, forgery, falsification, alteration, copying, fabrication, bribery, and collaboration without expressed permission. Beal University students are responsible for the preparation and presentation of work representing their own effort, skills, and achievements. Students will cite any quotations, materials or paraphrased materials taken from the work of others and fully acknowledge and identify the sources. The work of others includes published works as well as work completed by other students, and encompasses projects, assignments, computer exercises and exams.

• Cheating, including plagiarism or self-plagiarism, will result in an “F” grade for the assignment. If the offense occurs again, the student will receive an “F” for the course and may be grounds for dismissal from the University.

• Unless otherwise specified by your instructor, any submission must comprise the student's own work or must clearly acknowledge the source. Submitting work that you did not produce as your own, including but not limited to work that was generated using tool such as Chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Bard is academically dishonest and will be considered a form of plagiarism.

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. Most AI examples that you hear about today – from chess-playing computers to self-driving cars – rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. Using these technologies, computers can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns in the data. (SAS Institute, 2023).

ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched for public use in November 2022. While other AI chatbots are also in development by tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, OpenAI’s early rollout has eclipsed the others for now – with the site reaching more than 100 million users in 2 months. For some perspective, this is faster widespread adoption than TikTok, Instagram, and many other popular apps.

ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI that uses a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to generate human-like text in response to natural language inputs. (https://chat.openai.com/chat, 2/17/2023)

In other words, it is a complex piece of software that can be asked questions in conversational language and produces replies that read as if they were written by a human being. It achieves this by inputting and analyzing enormous amounts of existing text (that's the "large language"), which enables it to mimic sentence structure and argument.

Keep in mind: they don't think. They don't understand, read, choose or give you the "best information." Sometimes it might feel or seem like it, but this isn't how the technology works. That said, they also won't tell you where they got the information they're pulling from, and who is doing the work behind the scenes. Many, if not most, are unregulated and influenced by how we all interact with it. 

Thanks to Duke University.