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Can ChatGPT write as rhetorically as humans do? A discourse study of ChatGPT- and human-generated research article abstracts in Applied Linguistics

 

The past few decades have seen remarkable advancements in information and communication technologies, leading to the widespread integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into various sectors, namely healthcare, finance, customer service, and entertainment. One prominent instance of this AI application is Apple’s Siri, a smart voice assistant used on mobile devices to help users perform personal tasks such as making suggestions, answering queries, controlling electronic devices, translating languages, and providing navigation assistance. While AI has influenced various aspects of our daily life, it has increasingly expanded into the realm of education. In particular, the development of ChatGPT has tremendously changed teaching and learning in schools. Like Siri, ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that utilizes natural language processing to generate human-like responses to questions and make predictions about the course of conversations. Since its official launch in late 2022, there have been debates on its application within the academic community. While some argue that ChatGPT is a threat to academic integrity, others argue that it can aid teaching and learning. Some also take a rather less extreme position, seeing its potential when it is used properly and critically. This current research project takes the last position by seeing ChatGPT as a pedagogical affordance while emphasizing the need to use it critically and develop an empirically informed awareness of what the tool can and cannot do. This awareness is very important because AI tools like ChatGPT are not humans at all and do not think the way humans think.

With ChatGPT becoming more commonplace in education, considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to examining its benefits and challenges, its impacts on teaching and learning, the abilities of researchers, teachers and students to distinguish AI writing from human writing and their perceptions of its application in teaching and learning. Despite much research on these topics, there have been few attempts to look at ChatGPT from a purely linguistic perspective. In particular, the extent to which ChatGPT can produce texts that are comparable to texts written by humans remains unknown in the existing literature. Without this empirical evidence, it is important to argue that both teachers and students need to be very cautious when using ChatGPT for writing purposes. Against the backdrop described above, the current research project in collaboration with researchers from the City University of Hong Kong will seek to examine whether research texts that ChatGPT generates can be as rhetorical as those humans produce. To this end, the genre of research article abstract is used as the object of analysis in the project. 
 
A multi-perspective study of the genre of crowdfunding proposal: its communicative context, rhetorical structure, metadiscourse, and multimodality.
Technological advances over the years have revolutionized knowledge exchange on a global scale. This dramatic change has accelerated the emergence of knowledge societies in different parts of the world. One crucial factor influencing the sustainable development of a knowledge society is its capacity to generate scientific and technological knowledge and transfer it into innovations that yield long-term economic benefits. Recognizing this importance, governments worldwide, such as those in Singapore and Hong Kong have prioritized various financial initiatives for both research and development and innovation and technology development in the higher education and IT sectors. However, the competition for government-led funding schemes is always fierce because of limited funding allocation and reliance on peer review for funding decisions. Accordingly, fundraisers from around the globe have started exploring other non-government funding opportunities to finance their projects. 
 

One such alternative that has gained prominence worldwide is crowdfunding. Since its emergence, crowdfunding has been utilized across sectors such as music, healthcare, tourism, film, hospitality, finance, and marketing, to name but a few. It has also gained acceptance in higher education institutions across nations such as Britain and America, where faculty members and students are allowed to seek public funding for their research projects through crowdfunding platforms. 

With crowdfunding having gained widespread popularity as a novel funding option all over the globe, it has rapidly attracted scholarly attention across disciplines such as medicine, information systems, economics, and sociology. Scholars in these fields have studied such topics as factors leading to crowdfunding success, motivations driving individuals to launch crowdfunding campaigns, and the social impacts of crowdfunding campaigns on healthcare and welfare. Of interest to those in applied linguistics have been the written descriptions of crowdfunding campaigns, i.e., crowdfunding proposals. With these texts still being an emerging genre, only several relevant studies have been reported thus far in the field. Accordingly, the present research project intends to extend the current literature by performing a multi-dimensional analysis of the genre of crowdfunding proposal in terms of its communicative context, rhetorical structure, and use of metadiscoursal and multimodal resources.