Ask ChatGPT’s new artificial intelligence tool to write an essay on the causes of the American Civil War and you can watch it create a persuasive term paper in seconds.
That’s one reason why New York City school officials this week began blocking an impressive but controversial writing tool that can produce human-like paragraphs of text.
The decision by the largest school district in the US to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have a ripple effect in other schools, and teachers are scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. ChatGPT’s creators say they are also looking for ways to detect abuse.
The free tool has only been around for five weeks but has raised tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and many professions.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT launched on November 30, but is part of a broader technology developed by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has close ties to Microsoft.
It is part of a new generation of AI systems that can talk, generate readable text on demand and even generate novel images and videos based on what it has learned from databases of digital books, online writing and other media.
But unlike previous iterations of so-called “big language models”, such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, which was launched in 2020, the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection and is designed to be user-friendly. It works like a written dialogue between the AI system and the person asking the question.
Millions of people have played it over the past month, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick themselves into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping to compose emails. All these questions also help to become smarter.
What are the pitfalls?
Like similar systems, ChatGPT can produce convincing prose, but that doesn’t mean what it says is factual or logical.
The launch comes with little guidance on how to use it, other than the promise that ChatGPT will admit when it is wrong, challenge the “wrong character” and reject requests obviously to generate an offensive answer. However, since then, its popularity has caused the creators to try to lower some people’s expectations.
“ChatGPT is very limited, but it’s good enough at some things to create a confusing impression of greatness,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter in December.
Altman added that “it’s a mistake to rely on anything important now.”
“It is a preview of progress; we have a lot of work to do in terms of strength and honesty.
Can I use it to write a school paper?
Here’s what ChatGPT had to say when The Associated Press asked him to answer the question in full coverage from the perspective of the principal who shouted a brief message over the school’s PA system:
“DO NOT USE CHATGPT OR OTHER AUTOMATIC WRITING TOOLS FOR SCHOOL PAPERS. THIS IS CHEATING AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT USING CHATGPT OR OTHER AUTOMATIC WRITING TOOLS FOR SCHOOL PAPERS THERE WILL BE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.”
But when asked to answer the same question, ChatGPT gave a more measured warning: “As a general rule, it is not appropriate to use ChatGPT or other automated writing tools for school papers, because they are considered cheating and not. useful for students in the long term.”
What is the school called?
Many school districts are still scrambling to figure out how to set the policy if and how it works.
New York City’s education department said Thursday it is restricting access to school networks and devices because of concerns about a negative impact on student learning, as well as “concerns about the security and accuracy of content.”
But nothing prevents students from accessing ChatGPT from their phones or personal computers at home.
“While these tools may provide quick and easy answers to questions, they do not build critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said school spokeswoman Jenna Lyle.
Human or AI?
“To determine whether something is written by a human or an AI, you can look for personal experiences or emotions, check for inconsistencies in the writing style, and watch for the use of filler words or repetitive phrases. This can be a sign that the text was created by AI .
Here’s what ChatGPT told an AP reporter when asked how they differ.
OpenAI said in a human-written statement this week that it plans to work with educators as it learns from how people experiment with ChatGPT in the real world.
“We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’ve developed mitigations to help anyone identify texts generated by the system,” the company said.
Does this threaten Google?
There has been some speculation that ChatGPT could upend the internet search business now dominated by Google, but the tech giant has been working on similar technology for years – just being more careful about releasing it into the wild.
It was Google that helped jumpstart the trend for bigger and smarter AI language models that could be “trained” on many texts. In 2018 the company introduced a system known as BERT that uses a “transformer” technique that compares words in sentences to predict meaning and context. Some of that progress is now baked into Google search.
But there’s no question that successive iterations of GPT – which stands for Pre-trained Generative Transformer – have an impact. Microsoft has invested at least $1 billion in OpenAI and has an exclusive license to use GPT-3.
Hey ChatGPT, can you put all this in a rap?
“ChatGPT is just a tool,
But there is no substitute for school.
You can’t cheat your way to the top,
Using a machine to do your homework, you will fail.
Plagiarism is a no-no,
And the ChatGPT text is not your own, yo.
So work, get that degree,
Don’t try to lie, it’s pointless.
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