ChatGPT and Academic Writing in Higher Education

Abstract

The invention of ChatGPT constitutes the most significant stride in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years. It was launched in November 2022 as an open-source chatbot able to generate human-like texts while engaging in deep learning (Deng & Lin, 2022; Eke, 2023). Developed to impact every aspect of society (Zhai, 2023), ChatGPT has quickly become the subject of educational endeavors (Mhlanga, 2023b) as well as controversies, dividing the education community into dystopians and optimists (Mhlanga, 2023a; Sejnowski, 2023). The debate has focused on the issue of academic writing, offering different views on how this AI tool might influence phenomena such as intellectual property (Bjork, 2023; Hill-Yardin et al., 2023), plagiarism (Yu, 2023), authenticity, originality and creativity in learning (Rahman & Watanobe, 2023), and critical and analytical thinking (Mhlanga, 2023a; Rudolph et al., 2023, Shidiq, 2023). Namely, education actors should respect ethical principles (Eke, 2023) and incorporate them into the inevitable educational use of ChatGPT in order to uphold equity and responsibility in education (Cohen, 2023; A. A. Jadhav & A. N. Jadhav, 2023; Kasneci, 2023).