ChatGPT Is Here — What’s NYU Doing About It?

New York City, NY — by Carmo Moniz

This story was originally published on New York University’s Washington Square News.

ChatGPT, the easily accessible, uncannily human artificial intelligence program that can quickly generate text from a prompt, has caused a stir at universities across the country. Faculty and administrators are split on whether it can be used as a learning tool, or if it is a vehicle for plagiarism that has no place on a college campus. NYU does not yet have a universal policy that covers the use of AI tools in the classroom, but some individual professors have included guidelines in their syllabi for the first time this semester.

As part of its response to the AI, NYU has also created a working group of 50 faculty and staff to help give instructors guidance about ChatGPT. Clay Shirky, the vice provost for educational technologies, who chairs the group, said the decision to create it was made after some faculty detected the use of AI by their students as early as December of last year.

“The technology here is not what’s new — what’s revolutionary, in fact, is usability,” Shirky said. “Almost everyone understands that this change has already happened. Faculty are now adapting, and that adaptation over the long term is going to include a conversation with students class by class.”

This semester will serve as an experiment for how ChatGPT can be used in a classroom setting at NYU, and the results will be used alongside student and faculty input to determine guidance for the next semester, according to Shirky. Rules governing the use of AI in the classroom will change and evolve over the next few years, he added — a consequence of the breakneck pace at which the technology is advancing.

Read the rest of the story at Washington Square News.