ChatGPT - a blessing or a curse for today`s students?

Most people will now be aware of ChatGPT, which was launched to an astonished public on November 30th 2022. An immediate sensation, within less than a week the software had more than a million users, and is today used by people all over the world for a variety of tasks. I can recall the first time I witnessed the power and versatility of the programme, being astonished at how it could compose informative essays on any subject within just seconds.

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-rained Transformer. Developed by OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research laboratory, the `chatbot` has been `trained` through the analysis of large bodies of existing written text. It is able to generate output texts given a variety of different inputs - these inputs could be as diverse as `compose an essay outlining the causes of the French Revolution,` to `write a short story about how an individual overcomes personal struggles to become a better person.`

What this means is that artificial intelligence is now able to produce `academic quality` papers on just about any subject within the domain of human inquiry and interest. Anything from articles on quantum mechanics, musicology, to fashion styles amongst the bourgeoisie in mid nineteenth century France. ChatGPT is able to create, within mere seconds, articles of any length - from a few sentences, to whole dissertations - incorporating the very latest information on the subject. It can even generate prose in the style of various authors. One could request it to write a treatise on air pollution in the style of Charles Dickens for example; or to write a biography of Isaac Newton in the laconic manner of Ernest Hemingway.

Besides creating written text, it can even compose computer code, allowing non specialists to write programmes using simple commands. At the moment this is probably most useful for competent programmers, who can use ChatGPT to generate code for simple functions, giving them extra time to focus on the more complex aspects of whatever software they are developing.

Now that ChatGPT is beginning to enter the public domain, being generally available to everyone at no charge (though perhaps not for much longer, as it is likely to be monetised shortly) many are lamenting the inception of this piece of computer wizardry, fearing it spells the end for well researched and edifying essays written by students. The uncomfortable truth is that ChatGPT can very likely write an essay on any subject better than any student can. Certainly it can do so faster - within seconds producing an impeccably written, deeply researched piece of unique work. For many students the temptation will be simply too great to resist - why spend weeks studying and writing an essay or piece of coursework, when ChatGPT can do a better job that you can, and in less time than it would take you to choose a title?

Of course it`s in the researching and writing that students will learn, and there is a very real danger that ChatGPT will be detrimental to their education simply because it is so good at what it does. I imagine in the not too distant future there will be software written to detect whether a piece of writing has been composed by a human, or ChatGPT - but all this will be doing is pitting one form of AI against another, and will most likely only ever produce inconclusive results.

ChatGPT can certainly be used by students in a way that is non detrimental to their learning. It can summarise long passages of text, enabling them to determine if a particular text is useful, and warrants closer scrutiny. It can also answer questions, providing a near instantaneous response to just about any academic query a student may have. The software can also provide tailored learning and study plans based on the student`s learning history. It`s certainly worth keeping in mind that, despite the sophistication, and quality of the written work it can produce, ChatGPT doesn`t actually understand the meaning of the content it is creating, for it merely relies upon scouring thousands of existing texts written by humans, detecting particular statistical patterns therein which it then uses to write its text.