“We Need To Talk About ChatGPT”: The Future of AI and Higher Education

On November 30th, 2022, OpenAI released the large language model ChatGPT, an extension of GPT-3. The AI chatbot provides real-time communication in response to users’ requests. The quality of ChatGPT’s natural speaking answers marks a major shift in how we will use AI-generated information in our day-to-day lives. For a software engineering student, the use cases for ChatGPT are manifold: assessment preparation, translation, and creation of specified source code, to name a few. It can even handle more complex aspects of scientific writing, such as summarizing literature and paraphrasing text. Hence, this position paper addresses the need for discussion of potential approaches for integrating ChatGPT into higher education. Therefore, we focus on articles that address the effects of ChatGPT on higher education in the areas of software engineering and scientific writing. As ChatGPT was only recently released, there have been no peer-reviewed articles on the subject. Thus, we performed a structured grey literature review using Google Scholar to identify preprints of primary studies. In total, five out of 55 preprints are used for our analysis. Furthermore, we held informal discussions and talks with other lecturers and researchers and took into account the authors’ test results from using ChatGPT. We present five challenges and three opportunities for the higher education context that emerge from the release of ChatGPT. The main contribution of this paper is a proposal for how to integrate ChatGPT into higher education in four main areas.