Abstract:

Introduction:
The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022 without significant warning caught the higher education community off guard and raised concerns about potential unethical use of the artificial intelligence (AI). Rather than reacting with outright AI bans, there is also potential for AI like ChatGPT to become a constructive pedagogical instrument if integrated judiciously.
In the Human Physiology course taught during the second semester of the first year of the Human Nutrition and Dietetics degree, students in previous academic terms performed an activity consisting of writing a summary of a physiology topic. Students were provided bibliography from physiology textbooks as well as scientific papers and were asked to extract key information and write an abstract. Hence, the emergence of ChatGPT, elicited concerns regarding misuse by students to generate summaries. Furthermore, the teachers involved in this activity considered that we are facing the new challenge of guiding rational and ethical use of this emergent AI technology which is here to stay and will be freely accessible.

Objective:
Thus, our objective was to design and implement an activity, in the 2023-23 academic year, focused at ethically integrating ChatGPT to foster critical thinking skills and enhance learning within the context of nervous system physiology.

Methodology:
ChatGPT generated summaries based on prompts from the teachers, that were randomly assigned to 10-12 students each. Students had to critically review their assigned summary in a report assessing the scientific quality and citations. Afterwards, students had to rewrite the text in their own words without copying verbatim phrases. Following the individual review, a seminar was held where students grouped according to the same abstract, collaborated to discuss their findings, wrote joint conclusions that were presented to the class by the appointed spokesperson.

Results:
Students identified errors in the AI-generated summaries, including conceptual inaccuracies, low scientific quality, as well as grammatical and language mistakes. They also discerned unreliable citation sources used by ChatGPT, such as student notes from websites and public pages, versus scientific articles. The seminar allowed the students to share insights into ChatGPT's responses to different questions and variability between summaries.
A survey with the statements "The critical analysis of the summary allowed me to better understand the physiology concepts" and “The activity allowed me to understand the importance of using quality scientific bibliography” was presented to the students that had to rate their preferences on a six-point scale where 0 indicated to 'strongly disagree' and 5 corresponded to 'strongly agree'. The rating, expressed as means ± SD, were 3.78 ± 1.11 (n = 54) and 3.80 ± 1.11 (n = 55), for the first and second statements, respectively. The scores of the survey showed that the activity promoted the learning of physiology as well as scrutinizing citations so that the students gained first-hand experience critically evaluating AI-written content for quality and accuracy.

Conclusions:
This critical analysis enabled students to differentiate valid from questionable sources and evaluate ChatGPT's limitations for academic work, demonstrating that AI may also constitute a pedagogical tool if integrated judiciously within the academic activities.

Keywords:

Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, critical thinking, ethics, human physiology.