03 May 2023

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ChatGPT: A disruptive innovation or disrupting innovation in academia?

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In an editorial published in March 2023 in the Journal of the American Dental Association, authors explore the use of Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), a versatile software application introduced in November 2022. ChatGPT is based on a large language model that interacts in a conversational manner with users that has the ability to respond to follow-up queries. The software acknowledges errors, misinterpretations and miscalculations. It also challenges counterfactual, hypothetical or fictitious scenarios.

The authors wrote that in the short time since it was introduced, ChatGPT has even been a coauthor of at least one article indexed on PubMed and has written a full article almost completely on its own.

A contemplative researcher might debate between the originality, authenticity and plagiarizing in the content of a manuscript from ChatGPT. However, it is not known clearly whether commercial software like iThenticate (Turnitin) used by journals are (or will be) able to detect that based on the similarity score they generate. Nearly all journals require the submitting authors to confirm the originality of the submission. However, ChatGPT might redefine the boundaries between originality and phoniness. Another issue to ponder is related to the criteria of coauthorship, which is more objective and easily discernible.

The authors said that ChatGPT is a disruptive innovation because it upsets the norm for many scientific, academic, medical, dental, health and social standards regarding original work and the creation of manuscripts and documents. But, at the same time, it has the potential to disrupt the origination of innovation from human brains.

The future will bring the introduction of more players and competitors in the field of chatbots, such as Google’s Bard (based on Language Model for Dialogue Applications AI) and Microsoft products built on Bing and Edge. Beyond a doubt, ChatGPT is useful and saves human efforts, but with this there is an urgent need to revise the guidelines and recommendations used by academic journals, university committees and educational institutions on tolerance limits to set between ethical norms and academic misconduct.

Divesh Sardana, Timothy R. Fagan and John Timothy Wright. "ChatGPT: A disruptive innovation or disrupting innovation in academia?" JADA. 20 March 2023. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adaj.2023.02.008.