ChatGPT is the newest phenomenon to hit the market. It is considered a natural language processing tool that is driven by AI technology. It allows the user to have “human-like” conversations and much more with the chatbot.
The chatbot can answer questions and assist the user with tasks such as composing emails, essays and code. Simply put, it is a person’s own personal assistant.
Elon Musk took to Twitter to voice his opinion on the program. He was one of the founders of OpenAI before leaving.
'ChatGPT is scary good,” Musk said. “We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”
The app seems to be the fastest-growing app of all time. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief said that the app had more than one million users in the first five days after the launch. Within the first two months after the launch, the number of users grew to 100 million. For comparison, it took TikTok nine months to reach 100 million users.
Many professors and teachers are wary of the app. Is it considered cheating? Are the students learning anything if they use it?
Mary Linder is a government professor at Grayson College. She touched on ChatGPT and how it could be dangerous for a student.
“ChatGPT is an AI-driven software, right, that will write things for you, and it can be things from ‘how do I write a cover letter,’ all the way to full papers,” Linder said in an interview with KXII.
“When that software launched, I was like, ‘holy moly,thisismorewidespread than I thought.”
Colleges typically use Turnitin to check student’s papers for plagiarism, and sometimes it can cause issues with papers written by ChatGPT. Even though the students said they weren’t trying to cheat, Turnitin flagged their papers.
“Iwouldsay99.9percentof my students were like, ‘I was just trying to make it better,’” Linder said in the interview. “It wasn’t from a place like ‘I’m trying to cheat.’” Professor Charles Palmer at Harrisburg University said that students could benefit if they used it as a tool and not an answer. Most professors, like Palmer, can tell the difference.
A professor can tell if a student uses the ChatGPT becausetheybecomefamiliar with the student’s writing style. The app only has a certain pool of answers to choose from, so the paper doesn’t always reflect the student’s voice.
Palmer said one of the downfalls is it relies on old information. If somebody were to ask it about something that occurred the previous day, it wouldn’t have the information.
He said there are ways for professors to get around students relying on an automated assistant. They can be “more savvy” with their questions. For example, instead of asking for a summary of a book or story, they could ask to explain how a particular chapter relates to their life.
Many colleges are researching to decide if using the app is considered cheating. In the academic world, if a student plagiarizes or is caught cheating, there can be serious consequences. The first offense typically results in getting a zero for the assignment. The second offence is usually failing the course and expulsion.
The ChatGP4 is so new that professors and administration is scrambling to figure out how to respond to it. They need to find the answers soon,becausetheappis free for anybody to use. This means the 100 million users is likely to triple by the end of the year.