Universities are a global business. Traditionally this is where established knowledge is stored and where new knowledge claims are evaluated. It’s also where the future of knowledge is handed from old scholars like me to the next generation of knowledge creators and workers who are here to learn their crafts.
AI chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT are arguably mechanisms that will produce a third seismic shift for how universities work. Their impact is magnified because they follow and build on two previous seismic shifts. One was the digital transformation which gave students and tutors access to vast amounts of content and enabled tools they can use to browse and search the web; the second was the driving force of the pandemic and moving education and the business of teaching and learning online.
GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer which means a lot of code has been invested in creating a bot that is designed to work out the intents of your questions. AI engineers can sometimes make immodest claims and these bots are already being called ‘natural language processors’. Hmm, that’s the ambition and design brief. The idea is that you can enter any question you like, and the bot will deliver a bespoke and useful answer, presented in everyday language. In reality you can find ways to interact more effectively with an AI chatbot by experimenting and/or if you know how it works – just as you can Google more successfully once you’ve learnt or read up on how Google behaves.
And the relevance to university life and the existence in future of traditional academic disciplines?
