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Among the responses to Wharton Business School’s nal MBA exam lay a “superbly explained” essay whose author relied less on critical thinking than it did on arti cial intelligence. e mastermind behind the essay was ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new cutting-edge machine-learning Generative Pre-trained Transformer that operates on trillions of bytes of training data.

ChatGPT has not only written college essays comparable to humanwritten ones, but it has also passed multiple law school exams, the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam and the AP Computer Science A test. Since becoming free to the public in November 2022, the AI writing assistant is also increasingly being used in Paly classrooms for discussion board posts, English essays and science Claim-Evidence-Reasoning responses, sparking discussion over where to draw the line between ChatGPT as a plagiarism tool and a useful educational one.

In 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Stanford student Sam Altman founded OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent research institution. eir focus was on creating Generative Pre-trained evolved into ChatGPT. OpenAI’s GPT models are designed to produce human-like text in widely varying contexts.

Unlike pre-programmed virtual assistants like Siri that search the internet to generate responses, ChatGPT generates original, human-like responses with its predictive machine learning technology, according to OpenAI.

Laura Biester, a Ph.D. researcher in natural language processing at the University of Michigan, said ChatGPT uses a multi-layer neural network to produce an output.

“ChatGPT takes in hundreds of billions of words, and then it’s trained to essentially predict the next word in a sequence,” Biester said. “So given the sentence I’m saying right now, (the model will) try to predict each subsequent word. ChatGPT is trained to do that on this huge amount of text.”

Stanford freshman and Paly alumnus Neil Rathi, who studies human and machine language processing, said ChatGPT’s model is similar to the way humans process words using the Surprisal eory.

“Surprisal eory is essentially that humans are trying to predict the upcoming word in the sentence,” Rathi said. “So if I have a sentence like, ‘ e children went outside to blank,’ the next most likely word in my sentence is ‘play,’ (the word) almost every human will (say) if they speak English.” Biester said ChatGPT’s large, comprehensive training set, combined with its input of the conversation’s previous history, allows it to remember context and perform complex tasks like writing essays and translating between languages. Despite these advances, Rathi said the threat ChatGPT poses to society is in ated. e public hasn’t really seen GPT, GPT-2 or GPT-3,” Rathi said. “ ey’ve gone from essentially nothing to ChatGPT. It’s not that meaningful if you’re a researcher, but the public has seen this massive increase in the ability of AI models, so (ChatGPT) has become this very interesting thing for people and newspapers to xate on. But Rathi said ChatGPT only imitates human language and does not understand human nuances like context and ese language models are not trained to understand language the way that a human can, so what they’re doing is more of an emulation of the output that a human can do,” Rathi said. “ ey’re producing language that looks like a human could have produced it, but they’re not producing it in the way that a human produces it. So, they’re not necessarily the most ective ways of getting cial general intelligence

Rathi said ChatGPT’s lack of human comprehension should make it evident to teachers when someone uses it for school

However, Biester said by introducing human input into the model, OpenAI has potentially introduced bias into ChatGPT.

“Anytime that you’re using human annotations for a model, there’s some opportunity for bias,” Biester said. “I don’t think OpenAI has given any information about demographic information or where ltering content) are from.”

50%

Biester said the tool can be used like since the emergence of new technology a subject to go away.

“Even if you assume that students certainly still need to learn and (understand) on the exams,” Biester said.

And junior Mihir Menon said he thinks or positive tool depending on how it is

“While the calculator may have stripped arithmetic, it has allowed students to math topics much more e ciently,” Menon leverage ChatGPT-type tech to handle students can move on to (more) challenging

As a computer science instructor, though, students might use ChatGPT to write assignments.

“We’ll need to change how we’re doing take output from ChatGPT and run

Rishi Bommasani, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, said the type of people who label data could impact the model, cally those who train ChatGPT to ensive questions as lter.

“One important class of (considerations) is trying to make sure the model doesn’t generate toxic content,” Bommasani said. “An important ethical question is who labels this toxic content and under what

As an arti cial intelligence tool that generates readable text with a human-like tone, ChatGPT can complete assignments on everything from understanding and developing code to composing a polished English essay by following a given prompt.

variables were learned during training GPT-3 and ChatGPT to predict human language.

Rathi also said ChatGPT is a useful but does not replace human cognizance.

“Unfortunately, when you ask ChatGPT going to be able to control the output give you the answer, so you don’t have asked it to explain or provide the rst the problem, but it cannot listen to those of a tutor.”

ough ChatGPT has limitations,

According to a Schoology survey conducted 70 Paly students have heard of ChatGPT recreational purposes or school assignments.

With ChatGPT becoming increasingly teachers say they have had to reevaluate methods, particularly in the English curriculum focus on establishing a defensible argument with speci c contextualization.

English teacher Keith Tocci said while generic responses that lack sophistication, dents will face a situation where they “AI can’t necessarily do that because done before,” Tocci said. “Even if it can not trust a robot to have as nuanced (of)

While ChatGPT-generated essays

Keerath Pujji said it can be a useful resource graph structure and grammar.

“If people are using it to further their vocabulary and sentence structure, it could otherwise, I don’t see students using it their learning.”

Pujji also said AI could change teaching students, if teachers start using it to create assignments.

“Personally, I think this takes away and it could lead to the future of education Pujji said.

Accessibility increases like how a calculator is used in math technology doesn’t cause the fundamentals of have access to a calculator, they (understand) the core concepts to do well thinks ChatGPT can be a negative is used and regulated. stripped away the challenge of manual tackle more advanced or complex Menon said. “So, if we are able to handle surface-level thinking so that challenging topics, it will be bene cial.” though, Biester said she is concerned write code for short programming doing things because if you’re able to it against a bunch of test cases, that solves your whole homework problem,” Biester said. “It makes it so much harder for students to stay motivated (to complete their own work).” ere’s still a lot of creativity that’s needed in computer science, and ChatGPT only focuses on how to write a small function rather than the architecture of the overall system you’re building,” Biester said. “So I don’t think we’re at the point now where it is not going to be creating the next new algorithm, and there’s de nitely still a need for people who are trained.” useful tool for solving simple problems cognizance.

Because ChatGPT does not copy detect the use of AI in writing with traditional com’s Similarity Report. Because of this, ley Tokheim said plagiarism is a signi Tokheim said the English department assess student writing to avoid the risk “We’ve talked a lot about di erent process or having students write their them in class by hand,” Tokheim said.

Regardless of the program’s ability to listen to instructions and follow prompts, Biester said ChatGPT has its downsides, especially because it cannot mimic human creativity.

ChatGPT a math question, you aren’t output because all it can do is immediately have to do any work,” Rathi said. “I’ve step to help me work through those instructions to act in the role is to gure out what works and what doesn’t, especially given that we’ve spent the past few years since entering COVID-19 developing all the online tools for assessing and writing.”

Tokheim said it is also important for students to be authentic with their work and challenge themselves as writers to build their con dence.

“Don’t be so quick to give up your ability to think critically,” Tokheim said. “Don’t turn it over to a machine. Really hold on to your willingness to struggle with knowledge and writing and presenting your ideas in a way that is hard. Don’t give that up so quickly, because then you really lose that ability to think clearly. is something writing helps students do.”

To help discourage plagiarism with AI, Pujji said the honor code should prohibit the use of AI assistants.

“I would probably consider using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas or to create a very basic outline for an essay, but anything beyond that is unethical,” Pujji said. “Without putting it as academic dishonesty, students wouldn’t be punished for using AI to write their essays, and this would open up the stage for many more Paly students to use it freely.”

And Menon said using text-generation models, even when allowed, should be cited.

“Even when it is allowed, every one should acknowledge if they used it — similar to citing a source,” Menon said. “Teachers should know whether or not their students’ work was aided by ChatGPT.” e breakthrough launch of ChatGPT has fueled debates over how to wield the power of AI in classrooms. ough it may be too early to see the full repercussions of ChatGPT in school systems, Menon said high school curricula should adapt to the growing technological advancements and should maneuver around the use of AI.

“Assignments, essays, problems, etc. should be restructured so it wouldn’t be bene cial to use ChatGPT,” Menon said. “Additionally, all classes could shift toward more discussion or presentationbased learning, which is an example of (a space) where ChatGPT wouldn’t be useful.”

Bommasani, the former head teaching assistant of multiple language learning classes at Stanford, said ChatGPT could a ect how computer science curriculum is taught at the university. e concepts we’re trying to teach won’t really change, but how we teach it might change more signi cantly,” Bommasani said.

“One of the great things in computer science is you can teach the same concept in many different ways, so we’ll learn some new ways of teaching (concepts) inspired by ChatGPT out of necessity because the old way is maybe less e ective.”

However, Rathi said the capabilities of ChatGPT and AI chatbots are not pressing problems since these technological models will have major limitations for the foreseeable future.

“It’s not something to necessarily be worried about right now, since (when) people are using ChatGPT, you can tell they’re using it,” Rathi said. “But if you give it a couple of years, AI is progressing so fast that we might get to a point where it is going to become useful. At the same time, AI has been progressing at a high rate because (developers) have been adding more data (to) these models, but there’s going to be a ceiling at which either we have no more data we can give them or the amount of data is too saturated, and we can’t get better performing models.” limitations, it is still popular among students. conducted by e Campanile, 84.3% of ChatGPT and 50% have used it for either assignments. increasingly prevalent in the classroom, reevaluate their curriculum and teaching curriculum where teaching methods argument and a strong line of reasoning while ChatGPT tends to write sophistication, at some point in their life, stuhave to respond to something new. because it’s working with what has been can produce (written work), I would (of) a response.” essays may lack sophistication, sophomore resource to provide feedback on paratheir writing skills and gain new could be good,” Pujji said. “But it in a way that would be bene cial to teaching in a way which disadvantages create lesson plans and grade writing away the personal aspect of teaching, education being completely AI-based,” from any source, it is di cult to traditional methods such as Turnitin. this, English Instructional Lead Shircant challenge with ChatGPT. department is exploring alternative ways to risk of plagiarism. options and focusing more on the their essays in class or write pieces of said. “ e biggest challenge right now