ChatGPT in students’ research: to forbid or to teach?

Importance. ChatGPT, developed on the basis of artificial intelligence technologies, is able to significantly change the scientific research activity of scientists and students, performing for them some routine work on searching and processing literary sources and other data, as well as compiling research texts. At the same time, the integration of ChatGPT into education and science causes heated discussions in the academic environment. The purpose of the research is a) to review studies on the use of chatbots in general and ChatGPT in particular in research work, b) to conduct an empirical study to test the ability of ChatGPT to compose research texts and describe the results of the analysis of the data obtained; c) to identify and discuss key issues related to the effectiveness of using ChatGPT in students’ research work. Materials and methods. The empirical study was conducted at Derzhavin Tambov State University and included interaction with ChatGPT in order to compile on its basis fragments of research work consisting of the relevance of the topic, a literature review (definitions of concepts and positions known in a particular field of knowledge), analysis of search results, selection of bibliography. The experimental work was carried out on the material of the methods of teaching foreign languages. Results and Discussion. ChatGPT has proven its worth in solving only a few research tasks in accordance with user requests (to formulate the relevance of the work, to give definitions of concepts proposed by different authors and descriptions of established constructs, to analyze and summarize data results, to generate new data, to compile a bibliographic list). The volume of reviews and the depth of their content turned out to be of more satisfactory and unsatisfactory quality. In addition, in cases of lack of the necessary information to solve the task, ChatGPT resorted to falsifying data and generating non-existent information. Conclusion. Based on the analysis of search query data, the authors identify a list of key issues and problems, the solution of which will contribute to a more effective use of ChatGPT in the research work of young scientists and students. Such issues include the following: a) the quality of the materials provided by ChatGPT at the user’s request; b) the availability of ChatGPT and other analog programs; c) the ability and capabilities of ChatGPT to provide certain materials and perform some analytical functions; d) the contextuality of a series of requests; e) the combination of traditional intellectual work of a person with work based on ChatGPT; f) the author’s ethics of writing research texts; g) the inability of ChatGPT to adapt the results of search queries to the user’s level of language proficiency; h) the educational aspect of creating ChatGPT research texts; i) the price of the question (or to what time and labor-intensive costs lead the using of ChatGPT in research work); j) the competence of the user in the professional field when using ChatGPT.