Five ways Chat GPT will change academia are:
- Chat GPT will accelerate the innovation process, tie into industry data sources more efficiently, and even shorten times-to-publication. Equity-wise, it should make publicly available data more accessible to non-English speakers. It could create a more equitable and diverse set of researchers by helping people write better.
- Chat GPT will likely degrade the quality and transparency of academic research. It will create more challenges and issues related to plagiarism. Chat GPT can produce text and even manuscripts for submission in coursework or academic journals that are convincing but often wrong, biased and plagiarized.
- Chat GPT will revolutionize research practices and publishing by assisting researchers in designing experiments using probability analysis. It may even help academics conduct hypothesis testing, design surveys, or even write and complete manuscripts. It questionable still if Chat GPT or other AI tools are capable of conducting expert-level peer review or have the capacity to assist or support editorial decisions for peer reviewed journals.
- Chat GPT creates new ethical and legal challenges for researchers, publishers, and discipline-focused learners regarding original authorship, responsibility and ownership of ideas and models.
- The advent of Chat GPT requires new standards and guidelines for the use and citation of AI tools for all academic research. The academic community must demand new methods of verifying and evaluating the quality and accuracy of AI-generated text and research assisted technologies such as Chat GPT
