SAN ANTONIO — We've been hearing about so many negatives involving ChatGPT. Students using it to cheat and write essays for them and even to pass law exams.
At UTSA professors are using ChatGPT in positive ways involving critical thinking, to improve writing abilities, and they say it is even inspring students to write more than they would have before the program came out.
Dr. Mary Dixson, a Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas San Antonio told us, "What I hope this does is it changes from, Oh, I got to go buy an essay because I don't want to write to, oh the writing's not as bad as I thought it was, because there's other tools out there to help me get it started, to help me think."
In actuality, there isn't much difference between what ChatGPT does, and other AI that students use. Dr. Dixson said, "When you think about Google, I remember being a faculty member when that came out, everybody thought, oh well, now students are going out to do any research or we know that's not true. Calculators, oh well, now nobody does math excel. Oh, now nobody does calculations."
ChatGPT's popularity has exploded quickly! The website obtained 1 million users within 5 days of it's launch. It now has more than 100 million users two months after launching. It took Instagram 2.5 years to gain that many users. It took Facebook five years to hit that same mark. Dr. Dixson addd, "I think the thing that we'll see over time is whether or not it's something that people stick with or if it's something that you play with once and you never really touch it again."
And even though ChatGPT is in it's infancy, UTSA is running full steam ahead with the program. Dr. Dixson told us, "Our academic innovation team has been on top of this. So they've already got a great repository for faculty to start putting in our teaching ideas, our assignments, our assessments and the things that we're doing with it that we can be sharing with others."