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by Brandon Tupchong (7th)

“ChatGPT is a large language model created by OpenAI to simulate human-like conversation. It was trained on a vast corpus of text data, allowing it to understand natural language and generate responses to a wide range of prompts. Its responses are generated based on patterns and relationships in the language data it was trained on. ChatGPT can provide information, answer questions, give advice, engage in small talk, and tell jokes or stories, among other things.”

This entire paragraph above was written solely by ChatGPT. AI has improved to the point where it can create an entire college grade essay in seconds. This is a massive leap in technology with loads of potential yet to be discovered. ChatGPT will leave a massive legacy on not only the history of AI and technology, but also for the advancement of society as a whole. On the contrary, ChatGPT is a double edged sword. An extremely dangerous double edged sword that also brings heaps of consequences to society. 

Lets first focus on what this revolutionary piece of technology has to offer for us. ChatGPT undoubtedly has so many benefits to the future development of AI and technology and to society. In seconds, one complex question that could take you hours of researching and sifting through Google and other information sources can be answered effectively through the use of ChatGPT. You can ask any question to the chatbot, and it will answer it reliably. The process of researching has never been easier, and ChatGPT is just a glimpse of the impact that AI will bring upon research.

Not only that, ChatGPT is also able to generate stories and poems simply by typing in a prompt. It can assist people in creative writing by giving a general direction on what to write about. This can speed up the writing process quicker than ever before. More works of literature can be produced faster and more efficiently. An entire novel that could take years to complete could be finished in a few weeks with the help of AI.

 

ChatGPT’s creative works aren’t just limited to just literature. The film and music industry will be revolutionized with the emergence of ChatGPT. Films, shows, and plays don’t need scriptwriters anymore. All it takes to churn out a decent script is to input an idea into ChatGPT, and the script will be created in less than a minute. Although there may be faults in the completely AI generated script, they can be easily fixed through small human tweaks. ChatGPT is also able to create entire songs with lyrics, notes, and chord progressions. In the near future, you can expect to listen to music generated from an AI. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Despite the immense amount of benefits and advantages of ChatGPT, it also has its fair share of disadvantages. As mentioned earlier, ChatGPT excels at quick, detailed answers for questions. The problem with this is the accuracy of the answer. As stated by OpenAI, the company that programmed ChatGPT, while the answer that the bot gives might sound reasonable, it also might be completely inaccurate. What ChatGPT does is it finds patterns throughout internet databases such as books, websites, and articles that relate to your question. Then, it compiles and condenses this information into a few paragraphs. Sometimes, in the process of collecting data, it might also collect pieces of incorrect information copied on multiple sites, giving you wrong answers in the end. 

 

There are limitations to what ChatGPT can answer. ChatGPT is merely factual, meaning that prompts that require you to have an opinion might be harder for ChatGPT to crank out an essay about that topic. ChatGPT will most likely not know anything about your personal information. The AI also can only answer questions that date from 2021 and under. If you asked the AI about the events of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian invasion, ChatGPT would not be able to answer that question very efficiently at all. Due to the fact that the Russo-Ukrainian invasion happened outside of the time-scope that ChatGPT is able to answer questions in, it means that ChatGPT will have to go off of predictions and inferences to what might happen in a hypothetical situation of this invasion instead of what actually happened. 

ChatGPT is able to generate literature, but that doesn’t mean that what it creates is exactly of quality. Many times, ChatGPT-created literature sounds choppy enough for a human to recognize than an AI wrote the story. Stories written by a bot don’t sound the same compared to an article written by a person. Everyone has their own unique writing style, while a bot writes in the same general formula every time because it has been programmed to do that. Due to this, stories written by bots may feel soulless and uninspired without any edits by a person. 

ChatGPT’s easy accessibility means that anybody of any age can use it at any time. This also allows students to get their hands on the chatbot to use it for their own exploit. Students across the world have been depending on ChatGPT to write their essays. Due to the advanced, detailed answers that ChatGPT provides, Teachers and professors won’t know the difference between an essay written by a person to an essay written by a bot. This means that Schools and colleges are doomed when it comes to grading essays. Although there are detectors that can examine if an essay is written by a bot, students can simply tweak the AI-written essay a bit to bypass the detector. 

If cheating students using ChatGPT aren’t found, they will graduate scot free and will be the ones to run society next. Just imagine these people in the real world, having to depend on AI to do basic daily tasks for them. This is an unfortunate but true reality. 

On the other hand, ChatGPT might not be completely detrimental to essays. The impact that

ChatGPT will have on college writing could potentially be similar to how the impact of the calculator has on mathematics. The calculator helped make mathematics and problem solving more efficient instead of completely removing the need to learn math. With the upbringing of more advanced AI writing detectors, many of the worries about ChatGPT might disappear, and the AI will become part of regular society like the calculator. 

Also, there are easy workarounds to prevent students from using ChatGPT in their essays. One of these methods is that professors ask students to write an essay about their personal lives or current ongoing events. These types of questions can’t be properly answered by ChatGPT, meaning that the student will have to input effort through their brains instead of through an AI. 

Despite all of the drawbacks with the chatbot, ChatGPT is still the objectively best AI generated writing tool that is easily available to the public. Although the information that it presents you might be inaccurate and totally wrong, it can still generally give you a decent, plausible sounding answer most of the time. ChatGPT specializes in answering factual questions, so if you asked the chatbot to explain what quantum computing is, it will give you a fast, accurate answer. ChatGPT can help give a general layout and can help kickstart a work of literature, such as a novel. We aren’t certain about the exact impacts that ChatGPT and AI will bring upon our lives, but we are certain that it will transform modern society as we know it.

Image Citations:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Itv2jmz0F1k_dVJaUrNabZCE7yXOJ_ywTkwEBnEPj84/edit