“A.I has the potential to revolutionize many industries and change the way we live and work. It can help us solve complex problems and make decisions more efficiently, but it also raises ethical questions and concerns about the role of technology in society.” 

That opening statement was written by an A.I software called ChatGPT. The software has gone viral in the past few weeks for its astonishing abilities to write and answer questions without failure.  

AI has been on an almost exponential growth over the past few years, with its technology growing more and more capable in a multitude of fields. However, they were known to have bugs and issues that would make them recognizable at first glance. ChatGPT, on the other hand, has no bugs in its writing or grammar from my testing, which is startling for someone that is a writer. I asked the system ‘Write me an intro about A.I like yourself’ and it responded with the opening paragraph. In other conversations with the system, it had some minor flaws at various times when trying to understand my question. Regardless, each time it was able to spit out three to four paragraphs in under three minutes.  

CEO of OpenAI’s Sam Altman says that the system gained one million users within a week, setting the record for the fastest viral user growth in history. This growth, along with the potential and ability that this system holds, is now raising questions in fields such as writing and academia. Some students from colleges across the country have shown the use cases of the system when writing papers, and it seems that many schools have yet to learn of its existence.  

In an interview with the New York Post, Professor Darren Hick from Furman University exclaims; “Academia did not see this coming” after catching multiple students using the software to write their final papers for his class. “This is learning software — in a month, it’ll be smarter. In a year, it’ll be smarter” Hick said. Hick also noted, that while the system could write coherently, it lacks any style or personality to it unlike a human writer, making it somewhat noticeable.  

It will be interesting to see how this system and the use of AI evolves in the future, but with AI capability stepping into the spotlight, many have begun to wonder how it will affect certain jobs. For instance, how will the world of journalism deal with systems like ChatGPT in the future? Will articles be written faster than humans with more research and knowledge on a subject? Will it be able to break a news story before media outlets are even alerted? Its growth also brings up, as the artificial intelligence itself says ‘ethical’ questions, such as its role in plagiarism and using it to cheat on papers and exams. With such continuous use by new users every day, comes new advancement within the system, such as how a learning system works. Institutions and individuals will need to start understanding what role A.I may take in the workplace and in their lives now, before A.I understands it for them.  

Mitchell, Alex. “Professor Catches Student Cheating with ChatGPT: ‘I Feel Abject Terror’.” NewYork Post, New York Post, 26 Dec. 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/12/26/students-using-chatgpt-to-cheat-professor-warns/.