Technology Impact Report: The Rise of ChatGPT in Education

TECHNOLOGY IMPACT REPORT: THE RISE OF ChatGPT IN EDUCATION
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Technology Impact Report: The Rise of ChatGPT in Education
Introduction
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an AI chatbot created by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022 (OpenAI, 2023). When asked, “What is ChatGPT?” ChatGPT replied, “Hello! I’m ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. I’m designed to be able to understand and generate human-like language, and I can do things like answer questions, have conversations, and even generate text based on prompts” (ChatGPT, 2023). The technology has been hailed as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing (NLP) is expected to have far-reaching implications for how people use the web. This technology report examines two of the most controversial impacts of ChatGPT in the context of research, writing, and teaching in academics.
How ChatGPT Works
As a large language model (LLM), ChatGPT uses deep learning to process vast collections of text and, in turn, generate text in conversational form based on its GPT-3.5 language processing AI model (Browne, 2023; Shen et al., 2023). GPT-3.5 is an update on GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters and was trained on 570 GB of text (Montti, 2022). Research suggests that the dramatic increase in scale from GPT-2 to GPT-3 caused behavioral changes in the model, such as being “able to perform tasks it was not explicitly trained on, like translating sentences from English to French, with few to no training examples” (Montti, 2022).
In addition to being trained on enormous datasets, ChatGPT was trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) which enables ChatGPT to adjust its behavior based on input from human evaluators and output responses optimized for human user intention (Montti, 2022; OpenAI, 2023; Shen et al., 2023). Further, ChatGPT has been fine-tuned several iterations using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), a new class of reinforcement learning algorithms optimized for both usability and performance (OpenAI, 2023). Recent research indicates that ChatGPT, as a transformer, with its self-attention mechanism and advanced neural network, excels in a wide array of natural language tasks such as automatic summarization, machine translation, and question-answering (Shen et al., 2023).
ChatGPT in the Context of Education
Unlike modern search engines such as Google Search and Microsoft Bing, ChatGPT is fundamentally more direct and more coherent in its answers to user requests because rather than displaying a list of links to external web pages, it provides a direct and immediate response that flows like human dialogue (Abdul, 2023; Ortiz, 2023). This ability to produce human-sounding text allows users to not only engage in long natural-language conversations with ChatGPT but also use ChatGPT to generate well-written and well-structured essays, articles, editorials, proposals, technical reports, scientific papers, novels, and even poems. The numerous applications of ChatGPT in the production of text...