In case you haven’t been tracking latest developments in tech and society, there’s this AI that now can produce pretty good writing, just by feeding it a prompt. It’s called ChatGPT and available at https://chat.openai.com/ . If this truly is brand-new news for you and you’ve not heard of it before, then here’s a description from when it first came out , a few short months ago. Mashable called it “AI generated plagiarism” which didn’t seem quite accurate – is it plagiarism if what you’re copying wasn’t written by a person? Apparently so. (For a refresher, here’s one of several posts from us on plagiarism in writing bschool admissions essays.)
Most of academia is up in arms about this, because ChatGPT actually creates a well-written essay that surpasses what many college students produce on their own.
And there’s almost no way, at the moment at least, to check to see if an essay was produced by AI or not. (There are some smart people trying to work on this problem right now too.)
AI has all sorts of moral and ethical implications for our society and our future, and at the same time, EssaySnark is generally pro-advancement of our world through science and technology… So this post isn’t a hand-wringing of “Oh noz! What will become of us with this newfangled threat to our existence!” Instead, we’re going to look at the reality: This new thing exists. It’s good at what it does. It solves a problem that so many people have (producing something that people aren’t good at producing on their own).
Should you use ChatGPT to write your essays for bschool?
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Really, this invention is causing us to wonder what comes next. We have real concerns about how all of this will go. The opportunity for true abuse and manipulation of the truth is getting real.
Will AI cause the downfall of modern society? Who knows. But we do know that this particular train has left the station. The horse is out of the barn. No one is going to stop this now, and it’s roaring through academia already.
And yet there are real ethics here, which show up in your individual decision-making on your own approach to the task of writing your essays.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should — remember, being a leader means doing things that are hard. And anyway, at least as far as ChatGPT goes, even though you can, it might not turn out in the way that you’re hoping for if you do.
Tell us what you think.