ChatGPT Already Has Upended College

When artificial intelligence began to take hold a scant few years ago, one of the worries was that college students might use it to cheat. So have they? The headline of a New York piece on the subject provides a hint: "Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College." The story by James D. Walsh paints a picture of college life in which virtually every student uses ChatGPT or a cousin on virtually every assignment. Yes, college students have always cheated, but "the ceiling has been blown off" is one how one student he interviewed puts it. "College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point," is how a female student captioned a video of herself working. AI detectors exist for professors, but they mostly don't work—and professors themselves sometimes use AI tools to grade papers, raising the prospect of one robot evaluating the work of another.

"It'll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students' brains," writes Walsh. The students themselves worry about this. Walsh interviews a college freshman who sounds "strangely nostalgic" about the actual writing she did in high school. "An essay with ChatGPT, it's like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow," she says. "You just don't really have to think that much." But is she going to toil for 12 hours on a paper if ChatGPT can cut the time to two hours? "Now that we rely on it, we can't really imagine living without it," she says. The full story gets into the details of how students use the AI tools to work (sometimes having one AI tool rework the text from another), as well as the implications. "It's short-circuiting the learning process, and it's happening fast," is how one tech-ethics expert puts it. OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, disagrees. (Read it here.)