AI paves way for new era

A deep dive into the world

Story by Manasa Mohan

Introduction n the early parts of the 20th century, science fiction introduced the world to the concept of artificial intelligence technology, specifically AI robots. It began with Karel Capek and his science fiction play “Rossum’s Universal Robots” released in 1921 where he explored the idea of factory-made artificial people whom he called robots. In 1927, the world saw Metropolis, in which a robotic girl was physically indistinguishable from her human counterpart. 1937, the “heartless” Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.

The rise of ChatGPT

The first use of artificial intelligence was during World War II (1940) via the decoding of an enigma machine by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Ten years later, Turing released a test to test for machine intelligence, but it was in 1955 when John McCarthy coined the term “AI.”

Over the course of the next several decades, more robots were introduced to the world, but it wasn’t until 1997 when DeepBlue (an IBM computer) triumphed over legendary world chess champion Garry Kasporav when people took notice of the new developments and were left questioning how a robot could outmatch and outperform a human.

In 1998, Kismet was created, the first robot that could demonstrate social and emotional interactions with humans. Through vocalizations, facial expressions and other motor capabilities, Kismet had the capability to express various emotions: disgust, surprise, sadness, interest, anger and calmness.

In 2016, the first robot to have citizenship in any country, Sophia, was created. A humanoid robot equipped with artificial intelligence, Sophia can imitate facial expressions, language and form opinions and can get smarter over time.

On Nov. 30, 2022 a new chatbot was released to the public: ChatGPT. Taking the world by storm, it gained one million users in just five days after going public.

ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI that is trained on a massive dataset of conversational text. It is designed to generate human-like responses to text-based prompts, and can be used for a wide variety of natural language processing tasks such as language translation, question answering, and text summarization.

As with most AI technology, the introduction of ChatGPT to the public has raised some concerns, namely that it can be used for malicious purposes such as creating fake news or impersonating others. Considering the model is based on text data, the model can produce biased or discriminatory outputs and the model may be too accurate when it comes to generating human-like text which lends itself to deep fake attacks.

At the Wharton School of Business, ChatGPT earned a B to B- grade in a business management course exam. A Wharton business professor Christian Terwiesch said that the bot did “an amazing job” at responding to basic operations management and process-analysis questions, but had a harder time with more advanced prompts and made “surprising mistakes” with basic math.

AI changing the face of education

With the variety of uses that ChatGPT offers as a part of the platform, students have begun to increasingly use the platform to aid in their schoolwork: writing essays or short answers, answering questions, writing forms of code, projects and more.

“Even before this ChatGPT started, we have been seeing the effects of technology with different sites that people would send essays to and sharing answers,” Coppell High School IB English III teacher Stephanie Spaete said. “I think it's been long since coming. have seen some of this start to show up in some of the responses, even short answers, so it's a little concerning.”

Because of its popularity and rise, especially seen in English classes or more discussion based/essay writing classes, teachers such as Spaete have had to modify their curriculum and instruction in order to ensure students are still receiving a quality education, one that is not hindered by AI and technology that