BRTC Employees Interviewed by KAIT8 News

Black River Technical College (BRTC) Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Brad Baine and Social Sciences Instructor Rachel Koons participated in an interview with KAIT8 reporter Hayden Savage last week concerning Chat GPT.

Chat GPT, short for generative pre-trained transformer, is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that is trained on a massive amount of data, including books and website. It was developed by OpenAI, which is founded by Sam Altman. Chat GPT contains powerful algorithms that can generate content supposedly as well as trained writers within seconds, according to fortune.com.

Savage asked Baine and Koons about their experiences with Chat GPT, “this is something hitting all 50 states, can you describe what you’ve seen?”

“It really hit our radar around September, so I decided to test it,” Koons told Savage. She said  she gave it writing prompts and then compared several different answers Chat GPT gave her, and “there were many similarities in the AI’s answers.”

Baine said, “This is just the latest in technology advancement and we will have to find a way to utilize it, so we can maintain our academic rigor and integrity.”

To watch the clip from Kait8 news follow this link https://www.kait8.com/2023/02/17/new-ai-writing-website-concerns-educators/

Since the launching of Chat GPT OpenAI has developed its own plagiarism checker AI Text Classifier, which is a GT-3 and Chat GPT detector deigned to differentiate between human and computer written text.

A professional development session covering Chat GPT and Chatbot will be the topic of a BRTC Focus Friday on March 10 at the Paragould BRTC location.

During the session, there will be a panel that includes faculty and distance education staff.  The panel will provide information about the background and usage of Chat GPT, as well as suggestions and best practices to ensure that Artificial Intelligence does not violate the academic integrity of the BRTC course offerings.  Faculty will be allowed to hear from the panelist, as well as express their experiences with the AI technology.