CBSE officially bans use of ChatGPT during board exams

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has officially banned the use of ChatGPT, a language processing artificial intelligence (AI) model that has taken the world by storm since its launch in November last year. According to the latest instructions issued by the board ahead of the examinations, "Mobile, ChatGPT and other electronic items will not be allowed in examination hall."  

"Students are not allowed to carry any electronic devices inside the exam centre. This includes using device to access ChatGPT so that unfair means is not used," a senior board official said. 

Students at their institutes are banned from using the chatbot for academic assignments such as exams, labs and home works.  

Launched by Microsoft-back AI research firm, OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT is a language processing AI model that is capable of generating human-like text and uses a reinforcement learning method. The GPT in ChatGPT stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer", which means that the model was pre-trained on a vast corpus of text data before being fine-tuned on specific tasks. 

Besides CBSE, ChatGPT has been banned in some public schools in New York City and Seattle. It was also banned at top French university Sciences Po as it was "raising important questions... with regards to fraud in general, and particularly plagiarism," the institute said last month. Punishment for using the software may go as far as exclusion from the institution, or even from French higher education as a whole, it said. 

Following a global trend, Bengaluru-based RV University also issued an on-campus ban on ChatGPT. The RV University said that the ban applies to other AI tools such as GitHub Co-Pilot and Black Box as well. Surprise checks will be conducted and students who are found abusing these engines will be made to redo their work on accounts of plagiarism. 

Meanwhile, a 22-year-old student Edward Tian from Princeton University even built an app by the name GPTZero that helps fight AI plagiarism and forgery by distinguishing writing by a human versus AI.  

The model's capabilities are impressive, but it's not perfect. Like all language models, ChatGPT can generate biased or inappropriate responses if it's trained on biased or inappropriate data. 

To address this issue, OpenAI researchers have implemented several measures to mitigate bias in ChatGPT. For example, they have trained the model on a diverse range of text data and used techniques like de-biasing and adversarial training to reduce bias in the model's output.