Exploring the opportunities and challenges of ChatGPT in academia

Abstract

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) natural language model ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), often referred to as ChatGPT-4, has a wide range of possible uses in the fields of research, business, academia, health, and similar fields. This language model can accomplish a number of academic jobs that were previously completed by people, taking a significant amount of time and effort. The purpose of the article is to investigate ChatGPT’s potential opportunities and challenges in academia. To attain this objective, a review of relevant literature and online resources (news, articles, etc.) was carried out. The noticing-collecting-thinking approach was adopted to explore and categorize all observed concerns. The outcome of this study reveals that research, education, personal skill development, and social aspects constitute the four broad perspectives that articulate the opportunities and constraints of ChatGPT in academia. For instance, from the education perspective, ChatGPT can help students have a personalized learning experience. On the other hand, it might provide false information as well as lack the ability to generate responses on its own because those responses depend on training datasets, which may contain errors. Similarly, from the point of view of the personal skill development, this model may impair a person’s capacity for critical thought and content production; while providing reading and writing practice sessions and relevant content, it can improve a person’s language proficiency.