Almost every student has been there. You spent the afternoon mindlessly scrolling through your phone, not even realizing how many hours have passed since you began. When you finally decide to check the clock it’s already 10 PM. Panic starts to set in as you realize you have a whole six page research paper due at midnight, and have barely started on your opening paragraph. Thankfully, you heard a classmate talking about ChatGPT, and think to yourself, “Why not try it out? I just need to get this assignment done.”
ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a software developed to chat and have conversations that are almost human-like. This provides a great source for students especially to gather information and ask questions. The software is known for answering even the most complicated questions, and is said to be more accurate than many other search engines. This incredible accuracy is a huge concern to many school teachers. They fear that their students aren’t properly doing their work anymore, simply just asking this AI software for answers. One teacher at OA, Mr. Sunderland, chose to look at it in a different light though.
“From an objective point of view the technology is very interesting. It is still in its infancy so it will be fascinating to see where this technology goes and what really productive tasks it can accomplish. Right now people are just experimenting with it by asking it to answer direct questions or complete relatively simple tasks. But as it develops it could be used to write entire movie scripts or create legal arguments.”
Mr. Sunderland addresses the software in a positive way. The technology isn’t just used for trivial things, like school assignments. It can be used for huge projects, like scripts and important documents. With this great achievement comes setbacks though, especially for teachers with students who are aware of this software.
“It poses obvious challenges to certain professions. Not just education, but artistic profession as well. And it is going to take some time to adjust to this new reality. Ultimately, I think there will still be a need for authentic human creativity and personal instruction, but both professions will need to grow to accommodate this new technology.”
As well as educators in schools, Mr. Sunderland brings up other careers that this new software may influence. It may eventually even take over for a lot of the things that people have typically had to type out manually.
“As far as using it in school, I think it is basically the honors system right now. Blocking it is nearly impossible.”
As the ChatGPT software becomes more common, in schools and in other professions, we as a society may just have to get used to it being around. Especially at OA, considering Mr. Sunderland is talking about how hard it is to block it from the school WiFi, unlike other sites. This technology and software may be a lot more advanced than many people think.