Monday, February 27, 2023

ChatGPT and Academia - a tense relationship

After the first two days of the IRI§23 conference were primarily about practical usability, as far as the respective streams were related to ChatGPT, the focus on Saturday was on academic topics.

The first was the question of the protectability of language models and their results under copyright law. The answer to the latter is probably complex enough, there would have been no real need for the appeal for a general abolition of copyright in the field of science.

Highly interesting, however, were the reflections on the subject of teaching and on the subject of citation. With regard to teaching, the thesis was put forward without contradiction that the age of "academic homework" is finally over. No teacher can be expected to take responsibility for assignments that are actually written by highly developed chatbots.

And the scientific citation, is it also endangered? - I mean, yes certainly. How should a citation be composed if the result is not repeatable? After all, here there are massive differences in the new technologies compared to the common practice of citing web pages with an exact date of retrieval. But I also wonder if the question is really that prominent. Will there be legions of scientists using ChatGPT to write their papers? If so, then only in marginal areas, and there a copy&paste from Wikipedia should be sufficient. With appropriate reference.

Conclusion: Some questions can be solved, others only in the more distant future. It may be discussed further on academic ground.

Friday, February 24, 2023

ChatGPT - Revolution or bubble?



At "IRI§23", the International Legal Informatics Symposium in Salzburg, ChatGPT was the star. The deserving organizers had not quite expected this, but the number of visitors to the corresponding streams was high.

But what exactly is so special about this new technology?
  • The ability to correctly interp'ret human language, say some.
  • The ability to even write texts in a flawless form, the others.
  • ChatGPT revolutionizes database searching, according to some; or not.
  • It is a system that should be used only by experts because of its error-proneness - or, according to another opinion, only by non-professionals.
And so it went on, and every opinion was well-founded! There was even disagreement on the question of whether ChatGPT would tsunami-like overrun the legal world or whether it was just a risky bubble.

At least concerning the last question I have a clear opinion: ChatGPT (and the epigones) are too big to fail. The billion dollar investment leaves no other development. And after all, never in history has a new technology found so many users so quickly.

Conversational AI is making history, but no one knows exactly what form it will take.