We are a month into the illumination of ChatGPT. This is just one of another 10,000 blogs on its possible disruption to higher education and overall intelligence gathering. As an adjunct professor across a few different universities and types of colleges,
I see the task force at each institution ramp up with knowledge sharing and best practices, sharing on how to manage and handle this artificial intelligence organism. While recognizing the concern factor is there and how the user interface is intuitive and fast, my bottom line question though is:
Are we really that surprised?
Sure, don't get me wrong, I, like other professors and professionals, want original work, not copy-and-paste results....as to allow comprehension to rely on a robotic output of information only...as ChatGPT is innate.
However, to be in shock and awe and highly scrutinized in this new platform is what surprises me the most about how the industry is reacting.
The use of information to output other data from an intelligent perspective in machine learning has already been out there for many years. Marketing personalization, automation of business processes, and others. It's just a gathering of information with a defined criteria and triggered output.
To me, this is no different, just more so in a formalized ability to input inquiry on an output of something that we can still find happening on what we have already been doing on other forms of search engines and or data gathering.
To me, it's just the acceleration of "Ask Jeeves," but instead of the results being a bunch of websites that correlate with the question, now it's a prescriptive output of information versus the added step of finding the right source to get to that information. I almost look at ChatGPT as the Prescriptive analytics model in data science. Where the prescriptive information we are getting is based on advanced machine learning, just like prescriptive analytics where we are at a high confidence level beyond P value = >,05. Here we are now in a confidence level of less than .01 with ChatGPT.
This is why, while advanced and modernized, I am not sure this digital platform is as disruptive as we think it may be.
The absorption of use is what I wonder about industries in academia and professional sectors, is what I think is more interesting about this technology than the technology itself.
That, to me, is the question versus the immediate line in the sand around how disruptive it will be. So my theory, this is only going to get more innovative and digitizing higher education even further, and we may need to rely more on artificial intelligence learning anyways.
It's where many businesses and workplaces go and what customers absorb. So why not embrace that from an educational perspective as another part of society and focused learning methodology? I'd instead of being overly concerned by the technology, understand how it can be absorbed and part of where we evolve digitally and operationally.
Finally, this blog was not written by ChatGPT, although I was highly interested in doing so.....