The looming threat of using ChatGPT to cheat on essay assignments is overblown

Sample usage of ChatGPT.

Released in November, the bot is intended to be used conversationally, but has unexpected but poor application in writing essays.

ChatGPT, an advanced chatbot, was released for public testing in November with noticeable improvements over its counterparts, including filtering out inappropriate topics and memory throughout each conversation. Since its release, it has caused concerns over its capacity for cheating by students; however, ChatGPT is generally unsuited for writing essays for students and instead functions better in other areas.

ChatGPT can theoretically be used to quickly churn out essays, but its writing lacks distinct personality, disqualifying it from being useful for creative, evocative writing such as college essays. Often, its writing is overly wordy, repetitive and voiceless. While it may pass for school assignments by satisfying rubric requirements, traces of its usage can be detected by both humans and machines. Using ChatGPT is similar to students using paid essay-writing services or copying essays from online sources, resulting in extreme changes in a student’s writing style or factually incorrect information.

These tell-tale signs can be picked up on by teachers, just as they would for traditional cheating techniques like plagiarism. As text analysis improves, tools for checking if content is machine-generated will increase in accuracy and can be included alongside services like Turnitin. Additionally, timed in-class writing assessments can’t be completed through ChatGPT and will remain accurate assessments.

ChatGPT-written essays also lack in research and sources, another major flaw in using the service for schoolwork. Because ChatGPT is a model trained on large amounts of data from the internet, it doesn’t actually “know” anything. It’s often able to answer things correctly by approximating often-repeated solutions, but this is still a major drawback to its capabilities, and results in essays created by ChaptGPT citing bogus information that is clearly incorrect to human readers.

While ineffective as an essay-writing machine, ChatGPT can be an effective tool for reviewing essays or sparking ideas because of its capabilities in identifying the main ideas of an essay topic, offering feedback on areas for improvement, praising specific strengths and correcting grammatical issues. It can serve as a powerful analysis to reinforce what writers already have on a page as a replacement or extra layer of peer editing. Though stylistically weak, ChatGPT is remarkably creative in content and can be asked to evaluate fictional scenarios, make a paragraph rhyme, create a fictional character or generate a meal plan.

Alternatively, ChatGPT can be used with some effect in debugging and writing code. It is useful in outputting generic, often-used snippets of code and can be treated as a sounding board for ideas, pointing out flaws in logic from the user or suggesting possible solutions.

ChatGPT has significant drawbacks in the weakness of its writing and the fundamental way it is built, but it has applications in revising essays, generating ideas and being a conversational partner. Still, it serves as an exciting glimpse for future, specialized applications.