A university lecturer has expressed his frustration over a few of his students handing in what he deemed as “soulless, generic” essays written with the help of a ChatGPT AI chatbot. Jared Ahmad, who works at the University of Sheffield, tweeted his distress when he marked a set of essays suspiciously similar to those created by the chatbot.
The 43-year-old teacher from Oldham pointed out the negative tone towards universities, describing them as callous and soul-sapping. During an interview with the Manchester Evening News, Jared shared more details about his frustration: he had been trying to help each student build up their writing skills and was deeply disappointed with the shortcut taken to write the essays. He noticed the perfect level of English the essays contained, and suspected the use of the chatbot.
Jared teaches journalism, politics, and communication to international students who are trying to get employed in areas such as Chinese government, marketing and PR firms. He further declared that at masters level students are supposed to present critically thought out arguments.
ChatGPT is a conversational AI-powered chatbot designed to answer questions and respond to inquiries in a text form in a natural, human-like manner. The US firm OpenAI designed the chatbot to answer questions, write essays, create business plans, develop film scripts and provide context for images.
In contrast to other thoughts, Jared isn’t necessarily against the use of the AI tool. He tries to help his students understand how the machine can be used to attain a good understanding of a topic and learn to cite and read academic literature. He emphasizes that this technology cannot be the immediate solution to get the desired grades, and train them to think critically.
