Conference Session

Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE) Technical Session 1

Collection

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Suzanne Keilson, Loyola University, Maryland

Tagged Divisions

Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE)

John Searle’s Chinese Room Problem [6]. [7]This remains true with ourinteractions with large scale natural language AI such as the ChatGPT that has generated somuch current buzz. In this case it is not a brute force lookup but a prior machine learning fromprior examples of natural language. That does not mean that these language AI can ‘understand’.It could be that aspects of language such as humor or lying or subtext generally are the frontierwhere Chatbots fail [7].Whether programming is sequential, parallel, object-oriented or any other variant, the branchingof decision-making is constrained by what the programmer envisioned. There is no adaptation toevents or the environment except by the conditionals that the human programmer had

Conference Session

Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE) Technical Session 1

Collection

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Tyler Thomas Procko, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University ; Omar Ochoa, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Christina Frederick, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Tagged Divisions

Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE)

, compellingly titled“ChatGPT: Bullshit Spewer or the End of Traditional Assessments in Higher Education?”, the authors discuss the threatof ChatGPT to academic professionals and provide recommendations to them in the face of the growing expansion ofpowerful natural language models. They conclude with the following: “… we believe that major changes to traditionalhigher education assessments such as essays and online exams are in order to address the existence of increasinglypowerful AI, unless universities want to be akin to driving schools that teach [horse riding]” [18]. This paper does not long consider language models that can be used to write student assignments; it is mentionedas an area of tangential concern to educators. The primary focus of