I have been talking about
ChatGPT with my faculty colleagues.ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence resource that creates responses to questions
posed to it. It surveys the web, and has learned enough natural language ability
to create reasoned responses. You can ask it to write songs, poems, stories
with parameters you specify. It can sometimes be amazingly good and sometimes
stunningly bad. (Cf. below where I asked it to compose a poem based on Luke
8.22-25.)
I’ve played around with it posing biblical and
theological questions. The responses were mostly accurate, sometimes even insightful, and sometimes better than what I’ve gotten
from students. The concern in an academic setting is that the responses can be used without fear of
plagiarism, because each time you use it, it creates something new. (Apparently new tools are being created to check if someone has used ChatGPT.) You can get very specific about asking questions requesting evidence or citations, and you can ask it to include particular details in its response.
Someone did further testing using ChatGPT for
biblical stuff. You’ll see how far you can go with this: https://isaacsoon.com/blog-2/
You’ll also see that it has fatal flaws.
TLdr: ChatGPT was smart enough to identify what
the scholarly issues are re: Jew and Gentile in Romans 2. It was able to
address for specific and detailed questions. It even was able to cite known
scholars and provide citations for articles in JBL or in books. Good? Further
digging, however, showed that some of the citations were either inaccurate or
fictions. I.e., ChatGPT was probably drawing on stuff it found on the web where
people have made the errors, and it just repeated them. (Follow up article on Isaac
Soon’s ChatGPT experiment: https://christianscholars.com/chatgpt-and-the-turing-test-biblical-studies-version/
)
So what does this mean for seminary teachers?
- ChatGPT is out there,
it’s free, it’s handy… Assume students are going to use it.
- ChatGPT might be quite useful for students just wanting to
get some initial background information. In many instances, it’s better
than a Google search.
- It might be helpful in provoking new ideas. Stuck on a writing
a sermon? ChatGPT shouldn’t be used to write a sermon, but it might generate
some sparks to get you going.
- I think the most helpful way to use ChatGPT is to assign students
a question to ask it. Then, ask them to verify and provide accurate
citations for the responses. As a final outcome, they should edit or
rewrite the ChatGPT response and provide a better and more reliable
response.