Remote Teaching / Learning Technologies: Law Faculty Guide to AI, ChatGPT, and Similar Technologies

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or a robot controlled by a computer to do tasks that are usually done by humans because they require human intelligence and discernment. Although there are no AIs that can perform the wide variety of tasks an ordinary human can do, some AIs can match humans in specific tasks (Copeland, 2022)."

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses natural language processing techniques to respond to user-generated prompts.

Put simply: You can ask ChatGPT a question or provide a prompt and it replies using natural language. An example of how this works is included in the image below.

What Do You Need to Know About ChatGPT?

• OpenAI (the company that designed ChatGPT) collects a lot of data from users.
  • The privacy policy states that this data can be shared with third-party vendors, law enforcement, affiliates, and other users.
  • This tool should not be used by children under 13 (data collection from children under 13 violates the United States’ Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule - COPPA).
  • The Terms of Use (End-User License Agreement) state that “you must be 18 years or older and able to form a binding contract with OpenAI to use the Services” (OpenAI, 2022, para. 2). This means that students under 18 years old should not be asked to sign up to use the tool.
  • While you can request to have your ChatGPT account deleted, the prompts that you input into ChatGPT cannot be deleted. If you, or your students, were to ask ChatGPT about sensitive or controversial topics, this data cannot be removed.
• ChatGPT is not always trustworthy.
  • ChatGPT was trained using a massive dataset of text written by humans that was pulled from the Internet. 
  • Thus, the responses can reflect the biases of the humans who wrote the text used in the training dataset. 
  • ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet and the data used to train it was collected prior to 2021.
    • According to the FAQs, ChatGPT “has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content” (Natalie, para. 4).
• ChatGPT makes stuff up!
  • ​​​​​​​To make up for knowledge gaps (e.g., lack of training data to pull information from), ChatGPT will provide a response to the best of its ability (often made up) rather than say “error” or “cannot compute.”
  • See “How to Talk to ChatGPT, the Uncanny New AI-Fueled Chatbot That Makes a Lot of Stuff Up” (Ropek, 2022).
• Asking students to use ChatGPT provides free labor to OpenAI.
• ChatGPT is often at capacity, meaning that you cannot always rely on having it available for teaching and/or learning.

What Can ChatGPT Do?

• Write essays
• Write poems in the style of a specific author
• Write lesson plans
• Design an outline for a class syllabus
• Write policies for a class syllabus
• Write learning objectives
• Design quiz/test questions
• Write a script for a podcast or video
• Design a rubric
• Write emails
• Take notes on text inserted into ChatGPT
• Revise grammar and spelling on inserted text
• Write a text for students to read that is designed for a specific lexile level and includes specific vocabulary

Turnitin.com: Faculty can access the plagiarism detector Turnitin.com through the D2L course page for their class. You must set up an assignment in your D2L course page and instruct students to upload their work to the assignment in order to use Turnitin.

To set up an assignment and enable Turnitin go to your D2L course and click Assignment > New Assignment > Evaluation & Feeback > Manage Turnitin > Enable Similarity Report.

When enabling Turnitin you can select “More Options” to specify what content student work is checked against. Options include checking work against: Turnitin’s student paper repository, current and archived web content, and periodicals, journals and publications.

• OCU CETL instructions on how to let students run assignments through Turnitin.com before submitting for a grade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qblt5JOPV_U
• OCU CETL explanation of Turnitin.com similarity scores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYI4WIDXWyE
• Explanation of Turnitin’s current ability to detect writing generated by AI: https://www.turnitin.com/blog/ai-writing-the-challenge-and-opportunity-in-front-of-education-now
• Turnitin’s preview of their Innovation Lab technology to detect ChatGPT: https://www.turnitin.com/blog/sneak-preview-of-turnitins-ai-writing-and-chatgpt-detection-capability

Other AI detection tools:

• Openai-detector: https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/
• Gltr.io: http://gltr.io/
• GPTZero: https://gptzero.me/
• Copyleaks: https://copyleaks.com/ai-content-detector