“This changes everything...”

of a soul, each in differing word counts. In many ways, ChatGPT succeeded at its initial goals, gathering information and organizing it into a cohesive piece. Once it started reaching the 400 word mark though, it struggled to go in-depth, often not reaching word counts or relying on repetitive and cliched language.

For the pieces on evaluation and philosophy, ChatGPT played to its organizational strengths and clinched a C and a B, respectively. Still, the last piece failed to land, which Deitch said he would hand back to the student upon submission.

According to Deitch, the prospect of students turning AI-generated pieces isn’t concerning to him. “I know there are some people that [are concerned], but I think it will be very very easy to see,” Deitch said.

Moving into English class, ChatGPT was met with questions from Kerry Hasler-Brooks, Chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Writing. Hasler-Brooks tasked the AI pupil with a personal essay, close reading, and research paper.

Not surprisingly, ChatGPT failed to connect with the “human elements,” instead performing well with the summary and background of each text. Yet, while again failing to meet word count, its greatest lapse was crafting cohesive writing.“

As a writer, there's almost no synthesis of ideas, synthesis of parts, it's a very fragmented output,” Hasler-Brooks said.

Looking at the gradebook, ChatGPT earned a D- on its personal narrative, a C+ on its

- Keith Quesenberry

close reading, and an offer to come to office hours to discuss its final paper.

All this to say, if you’re planning on using ChatGPT to skip out on a class assignment, you may be out of luck for the time being.

Impacting Education

While ChatGPT may not currently be advanced enough to pass for a human, both Bos and ChatGPT’s developers claim many of its largest problems will soon be fixed. However, even if AI writing bested human abilities, Bos believes that fearing being “replaced” misses the potential of AI.

“You’re not replacing people,” Bos said. “What you’re doing is you’re actually empowering people to do more and better than you were before.”

When considering ChatGPT’s uses in education, Bos and Messiah’s faculty overwhelmingly pointed out its ability to help students research, brainstorm and draft their ideas.

“It has seen so much text, that it can often come up with different twists, different ideas, different variations than an unaided human can,” Bos said.

But don’t let ChatGPT’s grades in the classroom distract from its technological achievements.

“This changes everything,” Quesenberry said. “The way I see it is this is another significant revolution that's going to really shake things up. And it's not going to go away.”