There is concern among educators about Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted writing tools such as ChatGPT. The tool was recently forbidden across all devices and networks in New York's public schools and Australia has also restricted its use in some of its institutions.
As more students started turning to AI assisted tools to write essays, Australian universities decided indeed to opt for more pen and paper exams and tests, while the University of Sydney introduced in its academic integrity policy new rules regarding AI tools, warning that generating content using artificial intelligence is considered as a form of cheating.
But what is exactly ChatGPT? Created by independent artificial intelligence research foundation OpenAI (co-founded in 2015 by Elon Musk who left it in 2017 for conflicts of interest with Tesla), ChatGPT is an AI-based text generator, in a nutshell, the text version of the Text-to-Image AI tools many of us have been using to have fun and creating bizarre and at times disturbing images. The tool was launched in November and released for public use in early December.
ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLMs are artificial intelligence tools that have the ability to read, summarise and translate texts and predict future words in a sentence by generating sentences similar to how humans talk and write) with a conversational interface. The bot is trained on terabytes of text and data, mainly online materials (and this poses a question of authorship and copyright because Artificial Intelligence is not asking for permission to the authors it learns from and derives its materials from, something that may be considered as a breach of copyright; the same issue arises with images, actually, and there have been artists who claimed images generated with these tools actually stole their work).
Sign up, enter a prompt or query, and ChatGPT will provide a sample text. At the moment the system is capable of answering simple queries and more complex ones. The tool interacts with the user in dialogue format: in this way if it hasn't got enough information about somebody you're writing about, an artist for example, it will ask you for further information, or, after answering the first question, it will stop and wait for a follow up question. As a user, you can ask the tool to paraphrase and summarise a text, but also to expand it.
For the time being it is able to provide basic answers, but certainly it does not help a writer to make critical comments and comparisons. School and universities are worrying about the negative impact on student learning and potential for plagiarism (in this case we talk about "AIgiarism", that is, AI-assisted plagiarism, a term coined by the American venture capitalist Paul Graham; it is worth remembering that these systems produce texts undetectable by the usual anti-plagiarism software, but OpenAI recently announced they are developing skills to help teachers identifying texts that may have been generated by that system). Besides, educators are also concerned about the accuracy of contents.
The debate about such tool and students' performance is actually very vast: to write well, you must read a lot and read avidly and the main reason many of us are losing the will to write or students feel writing essays is a daunting, boring and difficult task, is because we have stopped reading in favour of image scrolling.
So, first of all, to stop students from using these tools we may have to first make them fall in love with reading. Writing will follow naturally, but students will have to be educated to use AI driven tools correctly anyway, after all, many future jobs will rely on AI systems. In the media field many writers and journalists use AI driven fact checkers; there are companies that, to speed up processes, provide their translators with automatic translations that can be incorporated in their texts if they are correct or dismissed or edited if they want. In a way, while Artificial Intelligence may bring new yet positive challenges to universities as it may encourage policy changes, it can also spark a dialogue about education and careers, and the pros and cons of embracing new technology, but it may also help some institutions retailoring teaching on single individuals.
Aside from critics, some have suggested indeed that AI tools such as ChatGPT may actually become useful for other purposes, including summarizing long articles, producing drafts or be transformed into a programming assistant (if you know coding, obviously). AI applications in future could also be used for other educational purposes, including marking essays or providing quick feedback to students, speeding up in this way a teacher's job.
Time will tell if the Artificial Intelligence will be accepted as a tool rather than as a source of AIgiarism in educational institutions. In the meantime, let's ponder about AI text tools and fashion: what will happen to fashion writing with such tools? Will the fashion industry go one day to full-on robot writing? Well, a quick experiment done with ChatGPT may prove fashion jobs may not be at risk: asked to provide something that can be easily fact checked such as a biography of a prominent and well-known designer like Giorgio Armani, ChatGPT came up with a basic paragraph including birthdate, early job and trademark style.
Asked to expand the biography, ChatGPT added information about costume designs (without indicating the exact release dates of the films) and expanding the paragraph about the awards Armani received. The system also added some mistakes, though, as it claimed that Armani did the costumes for "Moonraker" (1979) which actually features costumes by Jacques Fonteray.
Asked twice to provide a text about "Women empowerment in Prada's collections", ChatGPT in the first text wrongly assumed that Miuccia was appointed the same year Raf Simons joined the Italian fashion house; in the second text, instead, the system attempted to make more examples referencing collections, but messed up years and names, while also stating that Prada Mode is a collection while it is actually an itinerant club.
Asked to expand the paragraphs on the collections, ChatGPT made more confusion, calling the 2019 collection "Transformer", while the Prada Transformer is a temporary structure launched in 2009 by the fashion house, and stating the 2018 collection was called "Real Fantasies", even though this is the title given to a graphic project in collaboration with AMO, introducing animation and music to the lookbooks to highlight the conceptual references of the collections.
It is true that we are still in the early days of this technology, but you wonder if AI text tools may actually be able to generate reliable texts about disciplines such as fashion, beauty and fragrances, for other specific reasons as well. These tools are trained on texts, while industries such as fashion or beauty rely on other senses as well (you touch a fabric; you can feel a cream on your skin and you smell a fragrance), hence AI generated texts on specific topics may prove incorrect. In much the same way, being AI tools trained on texts they may not be able to produce responses to visual comparisons between two designs from different eras if that specific comparison hasn't been made yet.
Progresses are fast, though, so text generators will become more sophisticated soon and probably provide more convincing content one day. But, if you're a writer, and want to escape AI text tools or even confuse Artificial Intelligence, well, experiment more and create something extremely innovative and complex like a story written using words from a glossary you may have invented (think about the fictional argot defined as "Nadsat" in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange). There are indeed ways to oppose and destroy Artificial Intelligence or use it in a constructive way, and you decide what to do with it. But, if you're a student, remember, before handing out a piece written with the support of tools such as ChatGPT always remember to fact check references, dates and spellings and to use the piece as a starting point to give structure to your essay. In a nutshell, do not let only the Artificial Intelligence evolve, but use it to grow intellectually and improve your own skills.
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