ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot tool, has been around for just under a year, having been unveiled in November last year, yet it has become a major talking point, with the exchanges prompted by concern and optimism alike – almost in equal measure.

In January, academics at some of the world’s top universities set about probing whether ChatGPT threatened the continued credibility of traditional ways of assessing if their graduates would be worth their salt as, say, MBA degree holders. I’m talking, of course, about good old end-of-semester exams, assignments and dissertations or theses.

One of the universities that engaged in this exercise is the University of Minnesota, in the US, and the researchers found that, after completing 95 multiple choice questions and answering 12 essay questions comprising exams for four law modules, ChatGPT performed at the level of a C+ student. Not exactly flying colours, but a pass nonetheless.

It fared much better in a business management course at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, ranked by CEOWORD Magazine as the 2023 number one provider of business education globally. It attained a B to B- grade, with a business professor at the prestigious school saying it did an amazing job of answering basic operations management and process-analysis questions but struggled with more advanced prompts and made surprising mistakes with basic maths.

Similarly, ChatGPT passed final-year exams at the Stanford Medical School.

Inspired by how ChatGPT had fared in the US studies, Andre Calitz, a distinguished professor of computing sciences at Nelson Mandela University, and his wife, Margaret Cullen, a business studies professor at the same institution, set out to undertake similar research in South Africa. Their research question was: Can ChatGPT pass MBA modules in South Africa?

The study entailed presenting 2022 examination papers for MBA modules from several business schools in this country to the bot, and the answers generated were marked by examiners of the respective modules. ChatGPT passed 12 of the 15 modules, Calitz and Cullen state in a paper that ensued from the research – titled ‘ChatGPT: The new MBA student in your class’ – which earned the couple a top award at an international business conference held in Namibia last month.

Now, calls have been made by some for ChatGPT to be banned from the educational arena, with a senior academic from Wharton telling American television channel CNN earlier this year: “Bans are needed. After all, when you give a medical doctor a degree, you want them to know medicine, not how to use a bot. The same holds for other skill certification, including law and business.”

But this doesn’t mean there is nothing to recommend the use of ChatGPT in higher education. For one thing, it can improve access to education by speaking out responses to students with visual impairments, summarising topics and concepts from a course for students with learning disabilities and enabling students who have trouble typing or using a keyboard to speak out their queries. For another, it can assist educators by, for example, analysing students’ assignments and aiding in grading and providing constructive feedback. Based on an analysis of a student’s performance, ChatGPT can structure the course to meet the student’s needs, besides assisting with exam preparation.

We have also seen how deep fakes – the twenty-first-century answer to photoshopping, where AI is used to create convincing images and audio and video hoaxes – have been used to confuse voters in an election. In the US, where the next Presidential election is due in November 2024, the hoaxes are proliferating on the Internet. This came to the fore in April when Joe Biden announced his re-election campaign and his party promptly ‘released’ a rebuttal video portraying how an apocalyptic second term for the elderly President would look like. The video was quite convincing, but it was all a malicious hoax.

But AI also has the potential to enhance democracy by, for example, carefully deploying it in an election campaign to engage voters and help them be more informed about important issues.