ChatGPT Chatbot Can Write Anything from Student Essays to Legal Briefs, but Author and Reader Beware

MOLLICK: I would challenge you to find a single school where there are not a large number of people using this in their classes, whether the teachers know it or not. SCHMITZ: And how do they typically use it? MOLLICK: I mean, there’s a few things, right? So the most obvious thing and the thing people come away with if they play with ChatGPT for just a few minutes is, wow, I can cheat on essays with this thing. And then if they spend a couple more minutes, they say, well, I can cheat on creating software code or translating language. But the uses actually go way beyond that, and I’ve been amazed by what some of my students have been reporting about how they’re using the capabilities. SCHMITZ: Well, explain that a little. What other noncheating uses can it offer us? MOLLICK: Well, I mean, so many. But just on the education side, you can actually use it to – you can paste in an essay and ask it to correct it. You can paste in entire academic papers and ask it to summarize it. You can ask it to find an error in your code and correct it and tell you why you got it wrong. It really is this general companion for all kinds of purposes.

Mollick later explains how he used ChatGPT to create a syllabus for an MBA class, generate a final assignment with a grading rubric for that class, and even wrote the beginning for the second lecture he’d have to give in that class.  “It’s this multiplier of ability that I think we are not quite getting our heads around that is absolutely stunning,” notes Mollick.  Stunning indeed!  I tested out ChatGPT myself and was absolutely blown away. Here’s a sampling of what people are using ChatGPT to do, with varying degrees of success:

• Write an essay
• Write an article
• Write a legal brief
• Draft a contract
• Conduct legal research
• Write a syllabus
• Write email or text message
• Write computer code

As amazing as this technology is, it also raises numerous red flags. Unsurprisingly, many teachers and professors are concerned about student cheating. Fortunately, tools like GPT-2 Output Detector Demo can help detect text that was formulated by AI. [Update: But see this video on how easy it is to fool the AI detector.] But putting academic dishonesty aside, ChatGPT raises other concerns.  As with any technology, it’s important to understand how the tool works.  ChatGPT uses what it has learned from vast amounts of data scraped off the web to draft text.  However, it can’t check if what it’s saying is true.  “They can fool us into thinking that they understand more than they do, and that can cause problems,” said Melanie Mitchell, an A.I. researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in the New York Times.  They can also perpetuate bias.  “Because these new chat bots learn their skills by analyzing huge amounts of data posted to the internet, they have a way of blending fiction with fact. They deliver information that can be biased against women and people of color. They can generate toxic language, including hate speech” notes another NYT article.