When it comes to ensuring academic honesty in any field, professors have always had to contend with students using online tools to complete assignments. 

“Students using 3rd party tools and applications have always been something we’ve had to deal with,” said Dr. Kevin Sanft, Chair and Associate Professor of Computer Science. 

AI language models such as ChatGPT, Bard and Copilot have all contributed to many a headache by professional teaching staff worldwide, as students use these language models to finish assignments, write essays and even construct projects and presentations. 

“It isn’t just students; Some faculty on campus have told me they are feeding textbooks to ChatGPT and having it create quiz questions for them,” Kevin said. “Then they feed it student submissions alongside a rubric, and ask it to grade it for them.”

As of last Thursday, popular computer chip manufacturer Nvidia found their stocks reaching 2 trillion USD, with market value shooting up by 277 billion USD in a single day- the most gain in a single day in Wall Street’s history according to Reuters.com

We’ve even seen AI advancements here at UNCA. 

“One of our faculty members in Computer Science has been working on natural language processing,” Kevin said. “That’s her area of expertise, so she’s been contributing to the effort to develop large language models.”

Concerns still exist over AI use however, primarily due to convincing photo and video generation, with near lifelike video being generated by OpenAI’s Sora. Advertising itself as an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from prompts, it can generate incredibly dynamic and complex videos with the push of a button. 

“The tech is good enough now that you can make convincing videos of stuff that never happened.” Kevin said. “My primary concern is over people without the critical thinking skills we develop here at UNCA, who have the digital literacy to spot these kinds of things.”