ChatGPT is an asset, says professor at the world’s leading hospitality school

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has taken the world by storm. In education, teachers and students are recognising it potential as a powerful tool.

One high school English teacher in Oregon used this AI chatbot in her classes to create outlines for their essays on two 19th-century short stories (“The Story of an Hour,” by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman”).

After they got the outline from the chatbot, the students placed their laptops aside and wrote their essays. 

“They have to understand, ‘I need this to produce an outline about X, Y and Z,’ and they have to think very carefully about it,” the teacher told The New York Times. 

At school, a Midwestern high school senior told The Washington Post that he used the chatbot for two homework assignments: a computer science quiz and a coding assignment.

Students, on the other hand, have used the chatbot for exams at various levels. 

A Twitter user reportedly used the chatbot to take an SAT exam. 

At the University of Minnesota and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, professors shared that the chatbot passed law exams and another exam at the business school, CNN Business reports. 

It looks like there’s no homework, essay or exam that ChatGPT can’t do — so how should educators approach this technological advancement? 

ChatGPT is an asset, says professor 

Before ChatGPT took the world by storm, Dr. Reza Etemad-Sajadi was already well-aware of technologies powered by artificial intelligence and its potential. 

After all, he graduated with an MA and BS (Computer and Communication Sciences) from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne (EPFL), one of the world’s top universities. 

Much of his time here was spent learning different aspects of computer science, such as programming, AI, statistics, and many more. 

At that time, the Internet and search engines like Google were starting to develop, prompting the conversation about machine learning (a term to describe learning by AI).

“We already had an understanding of what a machine is and how a machine can learn,” Reza explains. “You have two stages: the learning stage and then having the opportunity to apply what it learns.”

Today, he is an Associate Professor at EHL Hospitality Business School. His research area includes customer relationship management, human-machine interaction, strategic marketing, and more.

The professor believes ChatGPT is the way forward in education.

“ChatGPT will certainly be an asset in hospitality, notably to improve knowledge management and customer experience. EHL must train future industry leaders to seize these opportunities, think critically, be adaptable and recognise the limitations and biases of AI,” he says. 

We caught up with the professor to learn more about how ChatGPT is changing the education landscape, specifically in the hospitality sector: 

What are the challenges and/or ethical issues students should look out for when using ChatGPT?

As a business school, we have a lot of responsibility to determine whether it is appropriate for students to use this tool. With this tool, some might think that they don’t have any more need to learn — and that is always our challenge. 

Our goal here is to guarantee that our students will be able to interpret the results given by a machine and determine the validity of its answer. 

Students shouldn’t have the feeling that [ChatGPT] would replace their creativity. They should still reflect on the answers given by the machine so they can compare the results. 

How will business schools use generative AI language model tools in the coming months and years?

It can be handy for generating some case studies or creating multiple-choice questions. There are a lot of options for using this kind of tool as a teacher.

It would not replace teachers for grading because it depends on the [academic] level. If it’s an essay question, of course, but it’s not the case for uni because it’s complicated for a language learning model. 

How can students prepare for these changes?

In our school, we have started to introduce virtual reality in our education and HyFlex (Hybrid + Flexible) learning model.

With that said, we have a crucial responsibility for our new generation. Our responsibility is to bring these technologies into the classroom. With the verge of the evolution of AI, the most important thing we will see in the future will be what we’re able to generate in the classroom — the co-creation with students and teachers. 

They also have to be prepared for the usage of ChatGPT and tools like that as new future marketers. For example, they will see how it can easily generate content, blog articles, and messages for social media platforms. 

What are the top challenges international students face in your course and how can they use ChatGPT to overcome these challenges?

My students have mentioned that they love to have more feedback from me. 

Unfortunately, sometimes I don’t have enough time to give personalised feedback. That’s where ChatGPT can be an interesting tool for students to use.

They can generate some open multiple-choice questions with ChatGPT and see how well they perform against these questions.

Likewise, they can also use the chatbot to draft questions linked to previous lessons and train themselves a little bit.