

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.

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.
