ost of the students at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) agree that Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is greatly involved in their daily life. They are now learning in collaboration with it.

AI has long been a hot topic, particularly since the introduction of Generative AI in the form of ChatGPT in November 2022. Compared with traditional rule-based AI products, which use a set of predefined “if-then” conditions to process data and make decisions, Generative AI uses neural networks to identify patterns in existing data to generate new content. For example, ChatGPT enables users to generate a story based on a prompt.

According to our survey, nearly 90% of the SISU students have ever used Generative AI. ChatGPT, a language model, is the most popular product used among them. Other commonly used Generative AI tools include New Bing, similar to ChatGPT, and some AI art generators, which can create paintings according to the prompt.

Our survey finds that while most of the respondents are satisfied with the suggested content in most cases, AI sometimes misunderstands their requests. Yu Jiaxing, a three-year SISU student majoring in Japanese, who is an early adopter of  Generative AI, said that ChatGPT could not interpret literary works with different cultural implications very well. Yu mentioned that once she asked ChatGPT to analyze the demonstration of Japanese folk culture in one of Izumi Kyouka’s novels, the answer was just a very superficial listing of information. “For me, ChatGPT can only help me to search some background information,” Yu said. 

As an advanced natural language processing tool, Generative AI has developed a strong inductive ability by learning a large number of corpuses. For example, ChatGPT is able to generate literature reviews, papers or abstracts at a fast speed. Many majors are facing challenge, especially the liberal arts. Over 80% of the SISU students surveyed agree that their major is being impacted or will soon be impacted by these products. 

“AI now can generate videos according to the instructions. It can choose proper clips from huge video materials and edit into an organized one, which is even hard for people to tell if it is AI-generated,” said Huang Ying, a SISU student from broadcasting. “If we don’t keep improving ourselves, it may pose some risks for our future career.” She often uses Generative AI to make short videos.

Although Generative AI becomes increasingly multifunctional, there are many things it cannot achieve as humans do. Shen Yansong, who majors in new media and online journalism, knew about Generative AI before ChatGPT was introduced. He said, “Take programming as an example, ChatGPT cannot give me a perfect code. I still need to modify and test repeatedly. Generative AI can help me to save time on the details, such as a particular syntax. Then I can focus on the larger structure.” Besides, the humanistic care and emotion are also what Generative AI can hardly substitute. 

“In face of the impact of Generative AI, we have to learn to use these tools properly, instead of being slaved by them,” said Duan Xinyang, a SISU student majoring in international economics and trade, who use AI tools almost every day.