Thomas Rid is Professor of Strategic Studies at and a founding director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington DC. Recently, he spent five days as a student in a class studying Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering. The chat.openai.com/chat/-tab was open on most student machines at all times during the course, and they used it in real time to enhance their learning. Formerly “a hardened skeptic of the artificial intelligence hype“, Professor Rid is now convinced that it will transform higher education.
The class saw that ChatGPT had limitations. “To scale it in the classroom we need to better understand its strengths and weaknesses …. It will hallucinate. It will make mistakes. It will perform more poorly the closer you move to the edge of human knowledge. It appears to be weak on some technical questions.” But Rid wrote that “[by] Saturday evening it felt like we had a new superpower“. Rather than talk about plagiarism and cheating, he urges us to engage in a more inspiring conversation: how can artificial intelligence enable the most creative, ambitious and brilliant students – helped by educators – to “push out the edge of human knowledge through cutting-edge research faster and in new ways“?