Generative AI is the future of higher education and innovation in human society.
Well this might be one debatable topic for someone to defend, like me (a student) and to oppose, someone who didn’t have an idea about the use of AI ethically and responsibly (non Computer Science background). The AI was developed to simulate intelligent behavior in Computer Systems by which it will help us to do tasks which can not be possible by humans individually. In this era of Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI is nothing more than one practical application of Machine Learning which is the technique to achieve the concept of AI. Generative AI means a technology or model which can generate the sentences or paragraphs to answer the prompt provided based on what it has learned from the datasets during its training sessions. The most popular ones are GPT 4, Bard, Phi-2, Gemini, Llama, Palm-2, etc. which were developed by giant tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Meta.
And because of this, it has become an important tool for academic purposes both for faculties and students. The students use it as a part of their academic activities, like preparing for their exams, understanding the topics which might be missed by them in class, asking for the advise which may not be provided by their friends, professors and families, taking help for the projects and assignments as it knows more than the people around them because it has been trained on the data of every possible domain. And for the professors and the academic staff, it is used for understanding any topics which might not be mentioned in the book they are referring to for their courses, taking help in their research works as it will take much time to understand it from the book instead of Generative AI models.
The concept behind the creation of Generative AI is LLMs (Large Language Models). In simpler terms, it is a model which can learn the languages (here text sentences) from the resources provided to them, be it research papers, books, articles, and everything which is giving some information or required learning to the model. They know and mastered the training on most of the domains, like engineering, medical, arts and humanities, natural sciences, commerce and finance, history and civics, and every stream which you can think of. This was the important and the particular reason for its world wide adoption and use for the academic professionals from every domain and fields. And this is what makes me to defend the use of Generative AI in academic purposes.
However there are some drawbacks alongside many conveniences it is providing. As we all know that it was recently covered in the news for its incapability to differ between plagiarism and copyrighted contents demanding prompts and the opposite ones. However it is still being resolved by continuously providing data and reducing the bias and variances. Also it sometimes being incorrect, maybe the reason is older data or the underfitting/overfitting in their training sessions. The underfitting means it is incapable to produce results in the test because of lesser data. And overfitting means, it is giving the best results on the training data but failing to produce accurate results in the newer prompts which it has never seen before. But it is constantly being improved by their developers.
I myself used and still use Generative AI because of many reasons which will give you a better understanding of why the students will defend it as I might not be representing all of them, but most of them. I am asking many questions which I might not have been asked from the professor during the class, fearing what people might think of me or how silly my question is. I am taking help from it by learning all the topics before the exam which I didn’t understand from the professor, friends or YouTube. I take help from it during my coding session or my project work to help me to understand this code and find the issues which are preventing this code from running successfully, and many reasons which I am not recalling right now but got helped from it.
And here is what my topic for today’s essay “Generative AI is the future of higher education and innovation in human society” justifies based on the above mentioned lines. This was my point of view to express my opinions and views. As I know that this world is democratic and everyone has the right to oppose me or my views based on what they know or think of Generative AI. But I really welcome any views, opinions, criticisms, advice from anyone. As this will help me to gain more understanding of broader views on it.
And at the end, I am concluding that the creation of Generative AI and its entry in the education sector has been one of the greatest revolutions which has happened in the history of mankind. While it still has some weaknesses and incapabilities to address the real world challenges, but it is constantly evolving and trying to be better to address it. Finally, it depends on who uses it and for what purpose it has been used. This will make it a better companion who will help us to develop and not to de-develop like what we are debating about the the internet, mobiles, computers, for the past few decades.
