Towards Education 4.0: The role of Large Language Models as virtual tutors in chemical engineering

Recent years have seen the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered generative chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot. These tools have simultaneously positively surprised and taken aback people worldwide, raising the question of whether they can or should be used in education, as well as how to properly guide students and teachers on using them safely and ethically. To this end, this work provides (i) a brief overview of the current applications of AI in Higher Education (HE), (ii) a discussion of the ethical and societal concerns associated with the usage of AI models, (iii) the initial steps of the implementation of a chatbot used at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) able to perform audits for Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), and (iv) an investigation of the need and opportunities of AI in chemical engineering education. The latter is achieved through quantitative and qualitative analyses of the responses given by both Master’s students and academia/industry practitioners on the introduction and use of AI in education. This paves the way for discussing current perceptions, expectations and concerns of AI models, as well as their limitations and the opportunities they could provide.