Is ChatGPT a blessing or curse for students?

Recently, I overheard a conversation in which a student said how he had finished his Calculus assignment in no time. I wondered to myself what glorious technique enabled that to happen. He then added that ChatGPT made the whole assignment a breeze for him. This got me considering whether the prevalence of artificial intelligence, or AI, at a breakneck pace is a boon or a bane for students in the digital age.

For those unfamiliar, ChatGPT is a commonly used artificial intelligence program with hundreds of millions of users globally. It works by using advanced natural language processing models to answer its user’s questions. The large language model (LLM) chatbot by OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company, can perform a vast array of tasks from writing an essay, to generating code, to summarizing a requested concept.

With that said, students need to realize that solely relying on ChatGPT results in more harm than good to academia as a whole. One of my biggest concerns is that ChatGPT provides inaccurate responses at a high rate as if it were a necessary truth. For example, when I asked ChatGPT whether the tax treatment of dividends and interest paid favors towards the use of debt financing or equity financing—the responses varied. It went from stating that the tax treatment of dividends and interest paid favors towards equity financing to deciding it would be debt financing, and finally, suggesting that I should consult with a teacher for clarification.

Another concern is that ChatGPT can be a letdown when it comes to asking it to generate a list of sources to utilize surrounding a specific topic. Imagine yourself writing a research essay and you turn to ChatGPT for assistance in compiling a list of books, documentaries, journals, or articles…only to find out that these sources are not peer-reviewed, not up to date, or simply are no longer accessible.

My advice, for what it's worth, would be that it is a more productive use of your time and resources to schedule an appointment with your professor or teaching assistant rather than utilizing ChatGPT. Arguably, it takes more effort to figure out the proper request to give ChatGPT, read what it spat out, verify that this information is true, and then edit it to make it seem like a person wrote it, versus asking for help or expressing that you are still struggling with a certain unit.

It is also important to highlight here that software like Turnitin, Copyleaks, and ZeroGPT have been programmed to detect if content is AI-generated or not. Knowing that the school’s penalty for plagiarizing is a final grade of “E” for the course, you would want to avoid that at all costs.

As Christopher Grobe, Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College, explains, ChatGPT is largely incapable of performing tasks such as properly citing sources, synthesizing information, or properly structuring an argument by the importance of claim, all of which are skills a college-level paper is expected to showcase.

All of this is not meant to imply that access to AI tools like ChatGPT should be banned on campus or that students should always steer clear of it—that sort of claim would be silly in this AI and technology-driven world. Rather, students must be trained in how to use these tools efficiently as well as ethically to preserve the goals of higher education: to provide them with the necessary knowledge and abilities in their chosen field.