ChatGPT - Big Trend or Big Threat?

Eleanor Lin (G6)

Opinion

Published Issue 5 2022-2023

In November 2022, the leading artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI launched its latest language model, the highly intelligent chatbot: ChatGPT.  Within just one week, it has attracted more than one million users.  

On the surface, this AI program can answer the most complicated and simple questions, as well as create college essays, fictional stories, poems, coding, and even your job resumes! 

Unlike Google on your laptop, which provides information serving as a general-purpose search engine, or Siri on your iPhone focuses on performing actions and providing information while you’re driving, or Alexa in your living room browsing answers from the internet to play your favourite song, ChatGPT is a language model trained on large amounts of text data to generate human-like text responses to questions and prompts, as if you are chatting with your university professor, or having a co-work partner for your coding project.

“It’s like having a robot friend who’s really smart and understands what you’re saying and responds in a meaningful way,” says Joe Manier, the founder of No Code Academy.  The New York Times labelled it “the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public."

The pros and Cons of this new technology are lively debated. Elon Musk says that it’s “scary good”. Professor Michael Wooldridge, the ex-head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford said: “It doesn’t know what’s true or false. It doesn’t know about the world. You should absolutely not trust it. You need to check what it says.”

ChatGPT makes it super simple and super fast to generate article outlines and then write content based on that outline with almost zero grammar errors.  This might be a helpful tool for marketers, but in the academic field, it becomes another issue.  

ChatGPT can write an introduction and abstract sections of scientific articles, which raises ethical questions. For example, Several papers have already listed ChatGPT as a co-author. Joanna Stern with The Wall Street Journal described “cheating” in American high school English with the tool by submitting a generated essay. Professor Darren Hick of Furman University described noticing ChatGPT’s “style” in a paper submitted by a student. One student in question confessed to using GPT when confronted and as a consequence failed the course.  As of January 4th, 2023, the New York City Department of Education has restricted access to ChatGPT from its public school internet and devices.

When artificial intelligence technology rapidly enters our daily lives, how should we respond, how should we adapt, and how should the government review and enhance  regulation to prevent another wave of damage?