AI-driven assistants for education and research? A case study on ChatGPT for air transport management

Artificial Intelligence is in the process to transform various parts of the aviation industry, from the reduction of delays and increasing fuel efficiency to better demand prediction models. The latest kid on the block is ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, which has made into the news for its mindblowing ability to create textual content in any structured language. Doing so, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate with computers, and it could have a lasting impact on aviation education and research. In this study, we investigate the potential of this impact and, the extent to which it has already materialized, based on a set of graduate student surveys and experiments with ChatGPT. The results of our surveys indicate the interest of students in efficient learning, time saving, and improvement in programming/writing skills. Our experiments on terminology explanation, state-of-the-art identification of selected research tasks as well as programming design, highlight the tradeoffs between benefits and potential risks inherent to the usage of ChatGPT and AI-driven assistants in general. Overall, we believe that our study makes a first contribution to evaluating an exciting new technology which has the potential to revolutionize our aviation system.