49% stake in OpenAI company, which owns ChatGPT, was recently acquired by Microsoft for $10 billion.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence platform with Natural Language Processing (NLP) model that generates coherent and natural text in response to a wide variety of questions. For this, the model is trained with a large corpus of text. This allows it to be used for tasks such as generating text, answering questions, and general natural language processing.
Academic Use: Issues of Integrity and Originality
The use of language models such as ChatGPT for academic work raises several ethical concerns. Although they can make research and writing tasks more efficient, allowing scholars to focus on more complex and high-value-added aspects of their work, questions are raised about the integrity and originality of the work.
One of the main ethical concerns with the use of language models for academic work is the problem of plagiarism. By using templates to generate text, it becomes very easy for people to present the work of others as their own. Only by paraphrasing, ie saying the same thing with other words and a different syntax, can one work be passed off as another.
This can devalue the hard work and dedication required to prepare a research paper. Which in turn can also reduce the credibility of the academic community as a whole.
Plagiarism itself is much more difficult to detect. This difficulty occurs because the text generated by the model will likely differ from the original source. As noted by researcher Daniel González Padilla, generative language models such as ChatGPT can be used to generate literary texts whose content is always different from the original and, therefore, difficult to detect.
lack of originality
Another ethical concern is that the use of language models for educational work can lead to homogenization of ideas and attitudes.
If people rely on these models, the text generated may be less diverse than text produced by human effort alone. This can lead to stagnation of thoughts and lack of critical thinking. A type of thinking especially needed within the academic community.
lack of context and implication
Furthermore, the language model is not designed to provide an absolute context for the information being generated, as ChatGPT itself acknowledges. The model generates text based on input and your training data, but does not have the ability to understand the ethical, cultural or political implications of the information provided.
This lack of reflection can lead to the spread of false information, prejudice or discrimination. All of these ethical concerns must be taken into account before using these models for educational work.
It would also be appropriate to develop guidelines and best practices to ensure the integrity and originality of the work being produced.
wisdom with wisdom
Philosopher Juan Arana affirms that consciousness is and will remain an unapproachable mystery to science. Moral conscience frees us for moral action and transcends mere cognitive experience.
Whether new and sophisticated advances will create awareness is as uncertain as Arana continues to be, solving the puzzle of why humans have it. Thus, he warns of the need to stop and think about scientific advances and their consequences. In doing so, it appeals precisely to the conscience, affirming that it is an irrelevant faculty for technical information systems. One has to think about himself and his presentations in his professional and personal work.
help?
As you may not have noticed by now, this article was written with the help of ChatGPT. The purpose has been twofold: to test the model and to invite the reader to ask some questions.
Initially, we approached the use of ChatGPT by asking what would be the ethical dilemmas that its own use might lead to. He immediately gave us an idea of ​​the three problems presented.
Then we wanted to delve into one of them and it led us to one of the cited authors. Finally, we take your own answers as reference in some parts of the article.
We can say that the test was a success, but we couldn’t stop asking ourselves the following question, which we believe goes beyond the academic world: Do we need to adapt to meet the increasing demands of our work? Should resort to the use of these applications? If accepted, what would be the limits of this experiment?
with or without consciousness
In the words of philosopher François Wallace, we must ask ourselves what is the ideal combination between reason without conscience (like ChatGpt’s) and reason with conscience (ours). It is necessary to consider its use, usefulness and consequences, without taking any position on the issues raised.
According to Vallaeys, we cannot ignore the tools that help us simplify certain tasks. But its use must be met with a personal and sympathetic experience of the author of the work. It is this contribution that will allow us to deepen dialogue and critical thinking.
It is about finding a balance between all and finding possible solutions. Answers that go beyond simplified output. Only in this way will we be able to preserve what is different, what is surprising, what is non-trivial and what is true of the human condition.
Javier Morales Mediano, DBA in Management and Technology Co-Director and Professor of the Department of Marketing, Comillas Pontifical University and Diana Loyola Chavez, Professor of Philosophy. Applied Ethics and Practical Philosophy, Comillas Pontifical University
