Sneaky Use of ChatGPT Replaces Student Effort

Let’s be honest, we all saw it coming: the day artificial intelligence took over. Sure, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but it isn’t that far from the truth. Students are now using artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, to complete daunting assignments.

ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, is a chatbot launched this past fall that can write everything from simple emails to lines of code. Scarily well done, the responses written by this AI have raised some serious concerns among educators.

But banning the software from school computers and reporting the hot topic on the news is not the only result at hand. As students become more dependent on technological advancement to completely do their homework for them, the more it seems the vigorous effort once put in by the students of the generation diminishes. The assignments’ educational purpose loses value as students do as much as read the prompt, merely plug it into a browser, and hit search. It’s not just the cheating that teachers should preoccupy themselves trying to fix, but also the toll it takes on the good stuff: the learning process.

This doesn’t mean the education system isn’t getting crafty with a counter-attack. Universities and high schools alike are already aiming to find new and creative ways to beat the ChatGPT epidemic. 22-year-old Edward Tian has already built his own website to aid teachers in catching their AI-using culprits in the act. Detecting the use of AI in a piece of writing, the website seems to be many teachers’ saving grace.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, there is nothing that will stop the use of ChatGPT and there’s no denying that the program can do great things. However, until it continues to change with the times, there’s no telling what the future of AI will look like. Certainly, there’s no telling what the future of education will look like, either.