use chatgpt for homework

3 ways to use ChatGPT to help students learn – and not cheat

Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Technologies, The Ohio State University

Professor of Educational Psychology and Quantitative Research, Evaluation, and Measurement, The Ohio State University

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Since ChatGPT can engage in conversation and generate essays, computer codes, charts and graphs that closely resemble those created by humans, educators worry students may use it to cheat . A growing number of school districts across the country have decided to block access to ChatGPT on computers and networks.

As professors of educational psychology and educational technology , we’ve found that the main reason students cheat is their academic motivation. For example, sometimes students are just motivated to get a high grade, whereas other times they are motivated to learn all that they can about a topic.

The decision to cheat or not, therefore, often relates to how academic assignments and tests are constructed and assessed, not on the availability of technological shortcuts. When they have the opportunity to rewrite an essay or retake a test if they don’t do well initially, students are less likely to cheat .

We believe teachers can use ChatGPT to increase their students’ motivation for learning and actually prevent cheating. Here are three strategies for doing that.

1. Treat ChatGPT as a learning partner

Our research demonstrates that students are more likely to cheat when assignments are designed in ways that encourage them to outperform their classmates. In contrast, students are less likely to cheat when teachers assign academic tasks that prompt them to work collaboratively and to focus on mastering content instead of getting a good grade.

Treating ChatGPT as a learning partner can help teachers shift the focus among their students from competition and performance to collaboration and mastery.

For example, a science teacher can assign students to work with ChatGPT to design a hydroponic vegetable garden. In this scenario, students could engage with ChatGPT to discuss the growing requirements for vegetables, brainstorm design ideas for a hydroponic system and analyze pros and cons of the design.

These activities are designed to promote mastery of content as they focus on the processes of learning rather than just the final grade.

2. Use ChatGPT to boost confidence

Research shows that when students feel confident that they can successfully do the work assigned to them, they are less likely to cheat . And an important way to boost students’ confidence is to provide them with opportunities to experience success .

ChatGPT can facilitate such experiences by offering students individualized support and breaking down complex problems into smaller challenges or tasks.

For example, suppose students are asked to attempt to design a hypothetical vehicle that can use gasoline more efficiently than a traditional car. Students who struggle with the project – and might be inclined to cheat – can use ChatGPT to break down the larger problem into smaller tasks. ChatGPT might suggest they first develop an overall concept for the vehicle before determining the size and weight of the vehicle and deciding what type of fuel will be used. Teachers could also ask students to compare the steps suggested by ChatGPT with steps that are recommended by other sources.

3. Prompt ChatGPT to give supportive feedback

It is well documented that personalized feedback supports students’ positive emotions, including self-confidence.

ChatGPT can be directed to deliver feedback using positive, empathetic and encouraging language. For example, if a student completes a math problem incorrectly, instead of merely telling the student “You are wrong and the correct answer is …,” ChatGPT may initiate a conversation with the student. Here’s a real response generated by ChatGPT: “Your answer is not correct, but it’s completely normal to encounter occasional errors or misconceptions along the way. Don’t be discouraged by this small setback; you’re on the right track! I’m here to support you and answer any questions you may have. You’re doing great!”

This will help students feel supported and understood while receiving feedback for improvement. Teachers can easily show students how to direct ChatGPT to provide them such feedback.

We believe that when teachers use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots thoughtfully – and also encourage students to use these tools responsibly in their schoolwork – students have an incentive to learn more and cheat less.

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Education technology
• K-12 education
• Educational psychology
• Large language models
• AI chatbots

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Using AI tools

• Using ChatGPT for Assignments | Tips & Examples

Using ChatGPT for Assignments | Tips & Examples

Published on 13 February 2023 by Jack Caulfield and Tobias Solis. Revised on 15 May 2023.

People are still figuring out the best use cases for ChatGPT , the popular chatbot based on a powerful AI language model. This article provides some ideas for how to use the tool to assist with your academic writing .

ChatGPT can assist you with the following steps when writing a paper, thesis , or dissertation :

• Developing a research question
• Creating an outline
• Generating literature ideas

Paraphrasing text

• Getting feedback

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Table of contents

Developing a research question with chatgpt, creating an outline of your paper with chatgpt, generate literature ideas, getting feedback from chatgpt, limitations of chatgpt, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about using chatgpt for assignments.

You can use ChatGPT to help you formulate a clear and concise research question by generating and improving potential questions.

With the help of ChatGPT, you can develop a large number of possible research questions within a short time. This is a great way to generate ideas and different approaches to a topic.

However, make sure that the generated questions make sense and meet your needs. As you can see from our example, you can keep working with ChatGPT to adapt its suggestions to your needs (or just edit the text directly if you already have a clear idea of what you want).

First input

Develop three possible research questions on the following topic: “The influence of social media on political opinion formation.”

ChatGPT output

• To what extent does exposure to diverse political perspectives on social media affect individuals’ political opinions and behaviours?
• How does the personalised algorithm of social media platforms shape the formation of political opinions among its users?
• What are the underlying factors that determine the effect of social media on political opinion formation, and how can they be measured and analysed?

Second input

Based on the second research question, develop three further research questions on the topic of polarisation in UK politics.

• Build my scientific method, qualitative discourse analysis, into each question
• Include the term “filter bubble” in each question
• How does the filter bubble effect on social media platforms contribute to the polarisation of political attitudes in the UK? A qualitative discourse analysis.
• What is the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating and reinforcing political echo chambers in the UK? A qualitative discourse analysis.
• How does the influence of filter bubbles on social media affect the ability of individuals to engage in productive political discourse across ideological divides in the UK? A qualitative discourse analysis.

Third input

Try to incorporate “qualitative discourse analysis” into the questions themselves, instead of using it as a separate sentence.

• How does a qualitative discourse analysis of filter bubble effect on social media platforms contribute to understanding the polarisation of political attitudes in the UK?
• What is the contribution of a qualitative discourse analysis to understanding the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating and reinforcing political echo chambers in the UK?
• How does a qualitative discourse analysis of the influence of filter bubbles on social media inform our understanding of the ability of individuals to engage in productive political discourse across ideological divides in the UK?

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You can also use ChatGPT to help you draft a research paper outline or thesis outline . To do this, try generating possible headings and subheadings and then improving them. ChatGPT can help to generate a clear and well-structured outline, especially if you keep adjusting the structure with its help.

However, it doesn’t have a deep understanding of your topic. As a result, inappropriate headings may sometimes be generated. It’s important to check that the outline makes sense and covers all the points needed to answer your research question.

You should also ensure that the headings and subheadings follow a logical structure. Scribbr’s Proofreading & Editing service can help you with this.

Create an outline for an academic research paper with the following research question:

“What is the contribution of a qualitative discourse analysis to understanding the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating and reinforcing political echo chambers in the US?”

The paper will be about 8 pages long.

• Background information on filter bubbles and political echo chambers
• Purpose of the study
• Research question
• Thesis statement
• Definition and concept of filter bubbles
• Definition and concept of political echo chambers
• Previous studies on the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating and reinforcing political echo chambers
• Critiques and limitations of previous studies
• Research design
• Participants
• Data collection and analysis
• Validity and reliability
• Findings from qualitative discourse analysis
• Results related to the research question
• Implications of the findings
• Interpretation of the results
• Comparison with previous studies
• Limitations of the study
• Implications for future research
• Summary of the results
• Implications for understanding the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating and reinforcing political echo chambers
• Conclusion and recommendations for future research
• List of references used in the paper
• Data collection materials
• Examples of qualitative data analysis

This seems like too much information to fit into only 8 pages. Can you condense the outline, for example removing the appendices and simplifying the structure?

• Background on filter bubbles and political echo chambers
• Definition of filter bubbles and political echo chambers
• Previous studies on the role of filter bubbles
• Limitations of previous studies
• Implications for understanding the role of filter bubbles
• Final thoughts

ChatGPT can be a useful way to generate ideas regarding what sources you might use in your work. Try asking it for suggestions about where to look and what to consider.

However, we advise against using it to find sources directly. It’s not designed for this and, if asked to do it, often just creates fake sources and presents them as real. Search a database like Google Scholar instead.

What types of sources could I use to write a paper on the following research question?

“What is the contribution of a qualitative discourse analysis to understanding the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating and reinforcing political echo chambers in the UK?”

When writing a paper on the contribution of qualitative discourse analysis to understanding the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating and reinforcing political echo chambers in the UK, you could use the following types of sources:

• Academic journals and articles: These are a good place to start when you’re looking for information on specific topics and they can provide you with in-depth analysis and perspectives on the topic at hand.
• Books and book chapters: These sources can provide comprehensive overviews of a particular topic and can also offer theoretical frameworks and historical perspectives.
• Government reports and studies: Government agencies may have conducted studies on the role of filter bubbles in perpetuating political echo chambers.
• News articles and media reports: These sources can provide insight into the current state of the issue, as well as opinions from various stakeholders.
• Online sources: Websites, blogs, and online forums can provide a range of perspectives on the topic and can also be useful in exploring the experiences of individuals who are affected by filter bubbles and political echo chambers.
• Data and statistics: Relevant data and statistics on the prevalence and impact of filter bubbles and political echo chambers in the UK can be useful in providing evidence to support your arguments.
• Expert interviews and focus groups: Conducting expert interviews or focus groups with individuals who have experience with or knowledge of the topic can provide valuable insights and perspectives that can be used to support your arguments.

You can also try using ChatGPT to paraphrase text. ChatGPT can quickly generate a number of different paraphrases of the same idea. You can keep typing “again” in the chat until you are satisfied with the result.

This kind of paraphrasing can be helpful to, for example, non-native speakers who want to improve the fluency of their text. However, be careful. The paraphrases often:

• Contain grammatical errors
• Include false information

So you should always check the output to make sure it’s correct. If you’re unsure, you can run the text through the Scribbr Grammar Checker and cross-reference the information against other, more credible sources .

An alternative is to use the Scribbr Paraphrasing Tool , which was designed directly for this purpose.

Paraphrase the following text:

“A filter bubble results from a social media algorithm’s attempts to cater to an individual user based on data such as their search history and previous behaviour on the site. It results in the user only being presented with information that confirms their biases.”

Restructure the sentences and use other phrasings for the following parts:

• “results from”
• “only being presented with”

“A filter bubble is created when a social media algorithm customises its content for a particular user based on their data, such as their search history and past actions on the platform. This leads to the user being confined to information that reinforces their pre-existing beliefs.” Note We strongly advise against having ChatGPT write text for you and trying to pass it off as your own work. This is academically dishonest and is widely considered plagiarism . It will usually result in an automatic fail, as well as other potential consequences .

You can also use ChatGPT to get feedback on the argumentation and structure of your paper and suggestions for improvements.

An advantage of this is that you can get feedback from ChatGPT on different text excerpts at any time. However, one downside is that ChatGPT does not have a deep understanding of your research question, so its feedback and suggestions may be shallow or inappropriate.

This kind of feedback cannot replace input from an experienced academic supervisor who’s familiar with your topic. Use ChatGPT feedback as a supplement, not a substitute for human feedback.

If you need in-depth feedback on your writing from someone with academic expertise, try Scribbr’s Proofreading & Editing service .

[Text you want to get feedback on.]

Thank you for submitting your research paper for review. Let me provide you with my constructive criticism:

Clarity of Explanations: Overall, the explanations are clear and concise, but there are a few areas that could benefit from additional clarification. For example, in the first paragraph, you mention “the mental lexicon,” but do not provide a definition or further explanation for what this is. It would also be helpful to provide a definition of “lemma.”

Smoothness of Language: The language in the paper is generally smooth, but there are a few instances where it could be refined. For example, the sentence “The symptoms vary from adding superfluous words and taking pauses to hoarseness of the voice” could be rephrased to “The symptoms of these disorders can range from excessive use of words and pauses to hoarseness.”

Structure of Text: The structure of the text is clear, with each paragraph building on the previous one. However, the transition between the first two paragraphs could be smoother. Perhaps you could add a sentence or two to bridge the gap between the two topics.

Even though ChatGPT is a powerful writing tool, you should keep the following limitations in mind:

No original research

Risk of plagiarism, fake sources, fake “facts”.

ChatGPT was trained using existing texts, and the texts created by the AI are based on this data. It’s not capable of doing its own research, only of synthesizing sources that it was trained on.

Additionally, because the texts that it was trained on only go up to 2021, it’s unfamiliar with more recent world events, cultural trends, and developments in different fields of research. This means it may provide outdated information.

Because ChatGPT was trained using existing text, the AI tends to reuse that content in a way that may be considered plagiarism. The AI may copy text from an online publication in its responses.

Additionally, using ChatGPT to write your assignment for you is considered plagiarism regardless of where it got the content from, because you’re passing off something you didn’t write as your own work.

ChatGPT was trained on a wide variety of sources, but it’s not able to accurately tell you what sources it’s using for any given output. Worse, it has a tendency to make up sources that don’t actually exist when you ask.

In addition, ChatGPT is not designed as a citation generator and cannot add correctly formatted citations to your work. Instead, try a tool designed for this purpose, like the Scribbr Citation Generator .

ChatGPT is not always trustworthy when it comes to giving you factually correct information. While it doesn’t deliberately lie, it also doesn’t have “knowledge” in a traditional sense, and it lacks the ability to verify its claims.

Instead, its responses are based on recognising and reproducing patterns that it has seen in other texts. This means that if it doesn’t “know” something, it tends to guess. And its guesses are presented with full confidence, just like established facts.

So it’s very important that you carefully check any factual claims made by ChatGPT against more credible sources —and don’t cite ChatGPT as a source of factual information for your research.

If you want more tips on using AI tools , understanding plagiarism , and citing sources , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations, examples, and formats.

• Citing ChatGPT
• Best grammar checker
• Best paraphrasing tool
• ChatGPT in your studies
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Best plagiarism checker

Citing sources

• Citation styles
• In-text citation
• Citation examples
• Annotated bibliography

Yes, ChatGPT is able to create code in different programming languages like Python, Java and C++.

There are several ways you can use ChatGPT in your studies , such as if programming is part of your bachelor’s or master’s degree.

You should not trust ChatGPT’s results unconditionally. While you can use ChatGPT during your studies to clarify questions, you should always double-check the answers you receive against other credible sources , as it doesn’t always give correct information. Don’t cite ChatGPT as a source of factual information.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

Caulfield, J. & Solis, T. (2023, May 15). Using ChatGPT for Assignments | Tips & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 8 July 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/using-ai-tools/using-chatgpt-for-assignments/

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Science News Explores

Think twice before using chatgpt for help with homework.

This new AI tool talks a lot like a person — but still makes mistakes

ChatGPT is impressive and can be quite useful. It can help people write text, for instance, and code. However, “it’s not magic,” says Casey Fiesler. In fact, it often seems intelligent and confident while making mistakes — and sometimes parroting biases.

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By Kathryn Hulick

February 16, 2023 at 6:30 am

“We need to talk,” Brett Vogelsinger said. A student had just asked for feedback on an essay. One paragraph stood out. Vogelsinger, a 9th-grade English teacher in Doylestown, Pa., realized that the student hadn’t written the piece himself. He had used ChatGPT. It’s a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool. It answers questions. It writes code. And it can generate long essays and stories.

The company OpenAI made ChatGPT available for free at the end of November 2022. Within a week, it had more than a million users. Other tech companies are racing to put out similar tools. Google launched Bard in early February. The AI company Anthropic is testing a new chatbot named Claude. And another AI company, DeepMind, is working on a bot called Sparrow.

ChatGPT marks the beginning of a new wave of AI that will disrupt education. Whether that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

Some people have been using ChatGPT out of curiosity or for entertainment. I asked it to invent a silly excuse for not doing homework in the style of a medieval proclamation. In less than a second, it offered me: “Hark! Thy servant was beset by a horde of mischievous leprechauns, who didst steal mine quill and parchment, rendering me unable to complete mine homework.”

But students can also use it to cheat. When Stanford University’s student-run newspaper polled students at the university, 17 percent said they had used ChatGPT on assignments or exams during the end of 2022. Some admitted to submitting the chatbot’s writing as their own. For now, these students and others are probably getting away with cheating.

And that’s because ChatGPT does an excellent job. “It can outperform a lot of middle-school kids,” Vogelsinger says. He probably wouldn’t have known his student used it — except for one thing. “He copied and pasted the prompt,” says Vogelsinger.

This essay was still a work in progress. So Vogelsinger didn’t see this as cheating. Instead, he saw an opportunity. Now, the student is working with the AI to write that essay. It’s helping the student develop his writing and research skills.

“We’re color-coding,” says Vogelsinger. The parts the student writes are in green. Those parts that ChatGPT writes are in blue. Vogelsinger is helping the student pick and choose only a few sentences from the AI to keep. He’s allowing other students to collaborate with the tool as well. Most aren’t using it regularly, but a few kids really like it. Vogelsinger thinks it has helped them get started and to focus their ideas.

This story had a happy ending.

But at many schools and universities, educators are struggling with how to handle ChatGPT and other tools like it. In early January, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT on their devices and networks. They were worried about cheating. They also were concerned that the tool’s answers might not be accurate or safe. Many other school systems in the United States and elsewhere have followed suit.

Test yourself: Can you spot the ChatGPT answers in our quiz?

But some experts suspect that bots like ChatGPT could also be a great help to learners and workers everywhere. Like calculators for math or Google for facts, an AI chatbot makes something that once took time and effort much simpler and faster. With this tool, anyone can generate well-formed sentences and paragraphs — even entire pieces of writing.

How could a tool like this change the way we teach and learn?

The good, the bad and the weird

ChatGPT has wowed its users. “It’s so much more realistic than I thought a robot could be,” says Avani Rao. This high school sophomore lives in California. She hasn’t used the bot to do homework. But for fun, she’s prompted it to say creative or silly things. She asked it to explain addition, for instance, in the voice of an evil villain. Its answer is highly entertaining.

Tools like ChatGPT could help create a more equitable world for people who are trying to work in a second language or who struggle with composing sentences. Students could use ChatGPT like a coach to help improve their writing and grammar. Or it could explain difficult subjects. “It really will tutor you,” says Vogelsinger, who had one student come to him excited that ChatGPT had clearly outlined a concept from science class.

Teachers could use ChatGPT to help create lesson plans or activities — ones personalized to the needs or goals of specific students.

Several podcasts have had ChatGPT as a “guest” on the show. In 2023, two people are going to use an AI-powered chatbot like a lawyer. It will tell them what to say during their appearances in traffic court. The company that developed the bot is paying them to test the new tech. Their vision is a world in which legal help might be free.

@professorcasey Replying to @novshmozkapop #ChatGPT might be helpful but don’t ask it for help on your math homework. #openai #aiethics ♬ original sound – Professor Casey Fiesler

Xiaoming Zhai tested ChatGPT to see if it could write an academic paper . Zhai is an expert in science education at the University of Georgia in Athens. He was impressed with how easy it was to summarize knowledge and generate good writing using the tool. “It’s really amazing,” he says.

All of this sounds great. Still, some really big problems exist.

Most worryingly, ChatGPT and tools like it sometimes gets things very wrong. In an ad for Bard, the chatbot claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took the very first picture of an exoplanet. That’s false. In a conversation posted on Twitter, ChatGPT said the fastest marine mammal was the peregrine falcon. A falcon, of course, is a bird and doesn’t live in the ocean.

ChatGPT can be “confidently wrong,” says Casey Fiesler. Its text, she notes, can contain “mistakes and bad information.” She is an expert in the ethics of technology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has made multiple TikTok videos about the pitfalls of ChatGPT .

Also, for now, all of the bot’s training data came from before a date in 2021. So its knowledge is out of date.

Finally, ChatGPT does not provide sources for its information. If asked for sources, it will make them up. It’s something Fiesler revealed in another video . Zhai discovered the exact same thing. When he asked ChatGPT for citations, it gave him sources that looked correct. In fact, they were bogus.

Zhai sees the tool as an assistant. He double-checked its information and decided how to structure the paper himself. If you use ChatGPT, be honest about it and verify its information, the experts all say.

Under the hood

ChatGPT’s mistakes make more sense if you know how it works. “It doesn’t reason. It doesn’t have ideas. It doesn’t have thoughts,” explains Emily M. Bender. She is a computational linguist who works at the University of Washington in Seattle. ChatGPT may sound a lot like a person, but it’s not one. It is an AI model developed using several types of machine learning .

The primary type is a large language model. This type of model learns to predict what words will come next in a sentence or phrase. It does this by churning through vast amounts of text. It places words and phrases into a 3-D map that represents their relationships to each other. Words that tend to appear together, like peanut butter and jelly, end up closer together in this map.

Before ChatGPT, OpenAI had made GPT3. This very large language model came out in 2020. It had trained on text containing an estimated 300 billion words. That text came from the internet and encyclopedias. It also included dialogue transcripts, essays, exams and much more, says Sasha Luccioni. She is a researcher at the company HuggingFace in Montreal, Canada. This company builds AI tools.

OpenAI improved upon GPT3 to create GPT3.5. This time, OpenAI added a new type of machine learning. It’s known as “reinforcement learning with human feedback.” That means people checked the AI’s responses. GPT3.5 learned to give more of those types of responses in the future. It also learned not to generate hurtful, biased or inappropriate responses. GPT3.5 essentially became a people-pleaser.

During ChatGPT’s development, OpenAI added even more safety rules to the model. As a result, the chatbot will refuse to talk about certain sensitive issues or information. But this also raises another issue: Whose values are being programmed into the bot, including what it is — or is not — allowed to talk about?

OpenAI is not offering exact details about how it developed and trained ChatGPT. The company has not released its code or training data. This disappoints Luccioni. “I want to know how it works in order to help make it better,” she says.

When asked to comment on this story, OpenAI provided a statement from an unnamed spokesperson. “We made ChatGPT available as a research preview to learn from real-world use, which we believe is a critical part of developing and deploying capable, safe AI systems,” the statement said. “We are constantly incorporating feedback and lessons learned.” Indeed, some early experimenters got the bot to say biased things about race and gender. OpenAI quickly patched the tool. It no longer responds the same way.

ChatGPT is not a finished product. It’s available for free right now because OpenAI needs data from the real world. The people who are using it right now are their guinea pigs. If you use it, notes Bender, “You are working for OpenAI for free.”

Humans vs robots

How good is ChatGPT at what it does? Catherine Gao is part of one team of researchers that is putting the tool to the test.

At the top of a research article published in a journal is an abstract. It summarizes the author’s findings. Gao’s group gathered 50 real abstracts from research papers in medical journals. Then they asked ChatGPT to generate fake abstracts based on the paper titles. The team asked people who review abstracts as part of their job to identify which were which .

The reviewers mistook roughly one in every three (32 percent) of the AI-generated abstracts as human-generated. “I was surprised by how realistic and convincing the generated abstracts were,” says Gao. She is a doctor and medical researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Ill.

In another study, Will Yeadon and his colleagues tested whether AI tools could pass a college exam . Yeadon is a physics teacher at Durham University in England. He picked an exam from a course that he teaches. The test asks students to write five short essays about physics and its history. Students who take the test have an average score of 71 percent, which he says is equivalent to an A in the United States.

Yeadon used a close cousin of ChatGPT, called davinci-003. It generated 10 sets of exam answers. Afterward, he and four other teachers graded them using their typical grading standards for students. The AI also scored an average of 71 percent. Unlike the human students, however, it had no very low or very high marks. It consistently wrote well, but not excellently. For students who regularly get bad grades in writing, Yeadon says, this AI “will write a better essay than you.”

These graders knew they were looking at AI work. In a follow-up study, Yeadon plans to use work from the AI and students and not tell the graders whose work they are looking at.

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Cheat-checking with AI

People may not always be able to tell if ChatGPT wrote something or not. Thankfully, other AI tools can help. These tools use machine learning to scan many examples of AI-generated text. After training this way, they can look at new text and tell you whether it was most likely composed by AI or a human.

Most free AI-detection tools were trained on older language models, so they don’t work as well for ChatGPT. Soon after ChatGPT came out, though, one college student spent his holiday break building a free tool to detect its work . It’s called GPTZero .

The company Originality.ai sells access to another up-to-date tool. Founder Jon Gillham says that in a test of 10,000 samples of text composed by GPT3, the tool tagged 94 percent of them correctly. When ChatGPT came out, his team tested a much smaller set of 20 samples that had been created by GPT3, GPT3.5 and ChatGPT. Here, Gillham says, “it tagged all of them as AI-generated. And it was 99 percent confident, on average.”

In addition, OpenAI says they are working on adding “digital watermarks” to AI-generated text. They haven’t said exactly what they mean by this. But Gillham explains one possibility. The AI ranks many different possible words when it is generating text. Say its developers told it to always choose the word ranked in third place rather than first place at specific places in its output. These words would act “like a fingerprint,” says Gillham.

The future of writing

Tools like ChatGPT are only going to improve with time. As they get better, people will have to adjust to a world in which computers can write for us. We’ve made these sorts of adjustments before. As high-school student Rao points out, Google was once seen as a threat to education because it made it possible to instantly look up any fact. We adapted by coming up with teaching and testing materials that don’t require students to memorize things.

Now that AI can generate essays, stories and code, teachers may once again have to rethink how they teach and test. That might mean preventing students from using AI. They could do this by making students work without access to technology. Or they might invite AI into the writing process, as Vogelsinger is doing. Concludes Rao, “We might have to shift our point of view about what’s cheating and what isn’t.”

Students will still have to learn to write without AI’s help. Kids still learn to do basic math even though they have calculators. Learning how math works helps us learn to think about math problems. In the same way, learning to write helps us learn to think about and express ideas.

Rao thinks that AI will not replace human-generated stories, articles and other texts. Why? She says: “The reason those things exist is not only because we want to read it but because we want to write it.” People will always want to make their voices heard. ChatGPT is a tool that could enhance and support our voices — as long as we use it with care.

Correction: Gillham’s comment on the 20 samples that his team tested has been corrected to show how confident his team’s AI-detection tool was in identifying text that had been AI-generated (not in how accurately it detected AI-generated text).

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How to use ChatGPT as a learning tool

Rather than weaken student effort, artificial intelligence can help prepare students for the real world by encouraging critical thinking—with a few caveats. Here’s advice from psychology instructors about how to use ChatGPT and other AI technology wisely

Vol. 54 No. 4 Print version: page 67

• Artificial Intelligence
• Schools and Classrooms
• Teaching Psychology as a Subject

As technology advances, psychologists can find new opportunities to innovate in the field and in education. But the introduction of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI)—the simulation of human intelligence by computers—can feel daunting. For psychology instructors in particular, the advent of a rapidly evolving AI software called ChatGPT (and the updated version, GPT-4) has introduced new challenges—but experts say it’s also ripe with potential to help students learn in new ways and prepare them for careers after college.

ChatGPT, a chatbot software launched by the AI company OpenAI in November 2022, synthesizes online data and communicates it in a conversational way. Unlike a search engine, ChatGPT can write verse in the style of Shakespeare, dole out dating advice, and—especially concerning to educators—answer test questions and write essays. Early reviews of GPT-4, the next iteration of OpenAI’s large language model, indicate increases in the software’s capabilities.

A New York Times article from earlier this year highlights instances of cheating with ChatGPT in college courses and instructors redesigning curricula to prevent academic dishonesty. Some schools are blocking the technology altogether: Earlier this year, the New York City Department of Education banned the use of ChatGPT based on concerns that it could hinder student learning ( Huang, K., New York Times, January 16, 2023 ).

Some educators, however, see ChatGPT as an opportunity rather than a threat. In an LA Times op-ed published in early 2023, psychologist Angela Duckworth, PhD, argues against banning the bot, explaining that it and similar technologies are here to stay—and that instructors should learn how to incorporate it into curricula ( Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2023 ).

Many psychology instructors are already experimenting with the software, recognizing that ChatGPT could be a useful tool to prepare students for the real world where critical thinking is more important than rote memorization.

“We have a choice here to lean in or run away, like we had a choice about whether we wanted to use calculators in statistics class,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek , PhD, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. “We now know people can learn using calculators, so the question is: How do we increase critical thinking while also embracing what ChatGPT can do?”

Integrating any new tool into the classroom should be done judiciously, and ChatGPT is no exception. Educators must consider ethics, cheating, and equity, just as they would when integrating other technologies into their courses. But with the right approach, ChatGPT can be a useful—and as some psychologists argue, revolutionary—tool to prepare students for their future careers. Here are some insights from psychology instructors about using ChatGPT to help students learn.

[ Related: APA Style: How to cite ChatGPT ]

Consider course goals

Every psychology course has different learning objectives. When determining whether—and how—to incorporate ChatGPT into your course, think about your specific goals as an instructor. “There are going to be classes for which using GPT would be inappropriate, but in other settings, it could be a useful learning tool,” said Daniel Oppenheimer , PhD, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Ask yourself: What are you trying to teach your students, and what abilities are you hoping to measure? It may help to think of ChatGPT like a calculator. If you were teaching simple addition, then a calculator might hinder learning. But in a calculus course, the same tool could free up cognitive resources to help students perform the more advanced skills they need to learn.

“We can do math better and faster now that we have calculators,” said Jaclyn Siegel , PhD, a postdoctoral research scholar and an adjunct psychology faculty professor at San Diego State University. “It’s harder to imagine a similar scenario happening in psychology, but maybe we’ll be able to think more creatively because we have basic facts at our fingertips.”

Similarly, if you’re teaching an introductory class, ChatGPT might pose a threat to students learning basic information. Spelling and grammar tools, for example, could get in the way of evaluating whether students can write. But if your goal is to encourage good ideas, “the other tools make essays easier to read and help instructors understand if students understand the material,” said Oppenheimer.

In classes that you determine would not benefit from using ChatGPT, using online proctors or programs that restrict access to ChatGPT may sometimes be appropriate.

Encourage critical thinking

ChatGPT offers fast and easy access to information, which you may deem inappropriate in certain learning scenarios. But finding ways to incorporate AI tools in your course could actually help prepare students for the real world, where they’ll need to apply concepts rather than simply recall facts. “We want to train students how to think like a psychologist rather than how to know what a psychologist knows,” Oppenheimer said.

The bot may be best used to help students think critically about topics they’re already familiar with, said Gary Lupyan , PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Like talking with a colleague, it can be an interactive partner that’s useful in areas you know a lot about already, so you can critically evaluate the suggestion without blindly copying it,” he said.

For example, Oppenheimer teaches a course on human intelligence and stupidity, in which he encourages students to compare GPT-generated text with human-generated text. Hirsh-Pasek actually requires her honors psychology students to use ChatGPT, asking them to use ChatGPT for a first draft and edit a second draft with critiques, corrections, and additions. “A really good essay is not just a synthesis of information, but also the ability to support a thesis,” she said. “ChatGPT teaches students to ask better questions and then defend those questions, which could help them become real scientists.”

ChatGPT can also be used to incite classroom or lab discussion, said James W. Pennebaker , PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. For example, you could ask the bot why one theory is better than another. Then, ask again why the second theory is better. “Students can learn to appreciate other arguments and see both sides objectively before establishing an opinion,” he said.

Using ChatGPT in your course not only encourages critical thinking about class concepts, but it also encourages your students to be technologically literate in an increasingly tech-centric world. “We should be thinking about the world we’re preparing our students to enter and what habits of thinking we want to instill in them so they can successfully represent the discipline of psychology,” said Oppenheimer. “That means figuring out how to incorporate novel technology they will be using in the real world into classroom exercises.”

Be aware of the cons

All technology sparks concern about academic dishonesty. If your students have access to computers during an exam, then they theoretically have access to ChatGPT. Be aware ChatGPT can easily answer test questions because of how it synthesizes information. Steering clear of multiple-choice exams can help resolve that concern, but open-ended assessments may be harder to grade, especially with large classes.

Lupyan cautions against overhauling your test questions to trick the system. If you try to design exams with questions ChatGPT can’t answer, you may miss questions your students need to be learning. “Questions that require synthesis and contrast are the type you want to be asking students and the type these models are excelling at,” he said.

It may be more worthwhile to implement practices shown to reduce all kinds of cheating, said Oppenheimer. Be clear about your expectations for the class and motivate students to be engaged with the material. Breaking assignments and papers into chunks that come together over time can make it more difficult to plagiarize, especially if you regularly provide feedback that students need to incorporate into their work. Just as important, offer support to students who may be struggling with the material.

Take time at the beginning of the semester to explain why academic integrity is so important in your class and beyond. “Tell them that while cheating may temporarily make things easier, it has a short time horizon, because they aren’t actually learning skills they need in their careers,” Oppenheimer said.

Communicate expectations

As ChatGPT and other AI technologies advance, universities will develop official conduct codes about their use. Until then, it’s up to you to implement and communicate expectations about how students can and can’t use these tools in your class. In your syllabus, offer specific scenarios in which it’s acceptable to use them and when it’s not, and be sure your teaching assistants are on the same page.

If you’re OK with students using ChatGPT in certain scenarios, Siegel emphasizes the importance of equity. She teaches a large online course for which she can’t prevent students from using notes or searching online for answers. As a result, she conducts open-book exams and allows students to use the internet or textbook to answer questions. (She emphasizes forcing students to put their cameras on during tests is inequitable if students don’t have sufficient internet bandwidth.)

To prevent savvier students from getting better grades, she introduces the whole class to ChatGPT to ensure that they know how to use it. “Curves are based on averages, so everyone should have knowledge and access to the same tools and materials,” she said.

Before determining how ChatGPT could help or hinder your students’ learning, spend time with it yourself. Test it out and see what it can (and can’t) do. If you’re not ready to bring the technology to your course, use it for planning or administrative purposes. Lupyan, for example, recently asked ChatGPT to suggest titles for a grant he wrote, and Siegel used it to generate active lessons for teaching about methods in sexology research for her human sexual behavior course.

Whether you run a lab or teach a course, encourage your students to try it out for fun, too. Pennebaker’s students, for example, have used ChatGPT to write haikus about psychological theories or rap battles between two well-known scholars. “With education, the more people can get their hands dirty and play with ideas, the better they learn,” he said.

Be patient as the technology continues to evolve. As of early 2023, ChatGPT has been intermittently inaccessible due to the overwhelming number of users. Consider signing up for auto-notifications so you know when it’s available.

Navigating new technologies like ChatGPT can be time-consuming and even overwhelming, but taking steps to understand them could empower both you and your class. “I get scared of new things, too, but they offer us a chance to grow,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “I challenge all of us to be the learners we want our students to be.”

Further reading

ChatGPT has arrived—and nothing has changed Oppenheimer, D., Times Higher Education, 2023

ChatGPT: Educational friend or foe? Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Blinkoff, E., Brookings Institute, 2023

Recommended Reading

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About 1 in 5 U.S. teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork

Roughly one-in-five teenagers who have heard of ChatGPT say they have used it to help them do their schoolwork, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17. With a majority of teens having heard of ChatGPT, that amounts to 13% of all U.S. teens who have used the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot in their schoolwork.

Teens in higher grade levels are particularly likely to have used the chatbot to help them with schoolwork. About one-quarter of 11th and 12th graders who have heard of ChatGPT say they have done this. This share drops to 17% among 9th and 10th graders and 12% among 7th and 8th graders.

There is no significant difference between teen boys and girls who have used ChatGPT in this way.

The introduction of ChatGPT last year has led to much discussion about its role in schools , especially whether schools should integrate the new technology into the classroom or ban it .

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand American teens’ use and understanding of ChatGPT in the school setting.

The Center conducted an online survey of 1,453 U.S. teens from Sept. 26 to Oct. 23, 2023, via Ipsos. Ipsos recruited the teens via their parents, who were part of its KnowledgePanel . The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey was weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents by age, gender, race and ethnicity, household income, and other categories.

This research was reviewed and approved by an external institutional review board (IRB), Advarra, an independent committee of experts specializing in helping to protect the rights of research participants.

Here are the  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its  methodology .

Teens’ awareness of ChatGPT

Overall, two-thirds of U.S. teens say they have heard of ChatGPT, including 23% who have heard a lot about it. But awareness varies by race and ethnicity, as well as by household income:

• 72% of White teens say they’ve heard at least a little about ChatGPT, compared with 63% of Hispanic teens and 56% of Black teens.
• 75% of teens living in households that make $75,000 or more annually have heard of ChatGPT. Much smaller shares in households with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 (58%) and less than $30,000 (41%) say the same.

Teens who are more aware of ChatGPT are more likely to use it for schoolwork. Roughly a third of teens who have heard a lot about ChatGPT (36%) have used it for schoolwork, far higher than the 10% among those who have heard a little about it.

When do teens think it’s OK for students to use ChatGPT?

For teens, whether it is – or is not – acceptable for students to use ChatGPT depends on what it is being used for.

There is a fair amount of support for using the chatbot to explore a topic. Roughly seven-in-ten teens who have heard of ChatGPT say it’s acceptable to use when they are researching something new, while 13% say it is not acceptable.

However, there is much less support for using ChatGPT to do the work itself. Just one-in-five teens who have heard of ChatGPT say it’s acceptable to use it to write essays, while 57% say it is not acceptable. And 39% say it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT to solve math problems, while a similar share of teens (36%) say it’s not acceptable.

Some teens are uncertain about whether it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT for these tasks. Between 18% and 24% say they aren’t sure whether these are acceptable use cases for ChatGPT.

Those who have heard a lot about ChatGPT are more likely than those who have only heard a little about it to say it’s acceptable to use the chatbot to research topics, solve math problems and write essays. For instance, 54% of teens who have heard a lot about ChatGPT say it’s acceptable to use it to solve math problems, compared with 32% among those who have heard a little about it.

Note: Here are the  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its  methodology .

• Artificial Intelligence
• Technology Adoption
• Teens & Tech

Olivia Sidoti is a research assistant focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center .

Jeffrey Gottfried is an associate director focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center .

A quarter of U.S. teachers say AI tools do more harm than good in K-12 education

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February 10, 2023

How ChatGPT Can Improve Education, Not Threaten It

A professor explains why he is allowing students to incorporate ChatGPT into their writing process instead of banning the new technology

By John Villasenor

Jeff Pachoud/Getty Images

To read the news, the sanctity of everything from college application essays to graduate school tests to medical licensing exams is imperiled by easy access to advanced artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can produce remarkably clear, long-form answers to complex questions. Educators in particular worry about students turning to ChatGPT to help them complete assignments. One proposed solution is to roll back the clock to the 20th century, making students write exam essays using pen and paper, without the use of any Internet-connected electronic devices. The University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach, is considering making it an honor code violation to use ChatGPT for taking an exam or writing a paper.

That’s the wrong approach. This semester, I am telling the students in my class at the UCLA School of Law that they are free to use ChatGPT in their writing assignments. The time when a person had to be a good writer to produce good writing ended in late 2022, and we need to adapt. Rather than banning students from using labor-saving and time-saving AI writing tools, we should teach students to use them ethically and productively.

To remain competitive throughout their careers, students need to learn how to prompt an AI writing tool to elicit worthwhile output and know how to evaluate its quality, accuracy and originality. They need to learn to compose well-organized, coherent essays involving a mix of AI-generated text and traditional writing. As professionals working into the 2060s and beyond, they will need to learn how to engage productively with AI systems, using them to both complement and enhance human creativity with the extraordinary power promised by mid-21st-century AI.

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In addition to the sound pedagogical reasons for treating ChatGPT as an opportunity and not a threat, there are practical ones as well. It simply isn’t feasible to effectively ban access to this technology. Honor code or not, many students will be unable to resist the temptation to seek AI assistance with their writing. And how would an educational institution enforce a ChatGPT ban? While there are tools aimed at detecting text produced by AI, future versions of AI will get better at emulating human writing—including to the point of emulating the style of the particular person who is using it. In the resulting arms race, the AI writing tools will always be one step ahead of the tools to detect AI text.

Enforcement of a ChatGPT ban would also inevitably produce the injustice of false positives and false negatives. Some students who use ChatGPT despite a ban would, through luck or thanks to careful-enough editing of AI-generated text, avoid having their writing flagged as AI-assisted. Worse, some students would be falsely accused of using ChatGPT, triggering enormous stress and potentially leading to punishment for a wrong they did not commit.

And what of the argument that learning to write well provides benefits that go well beyond writing? Writing a good essay from scratch requires careful, often painstaking, thought about organization, flow and communication. Learning to write without AI does indeed promote focused, disciplined thinking. But learning to successfully combine unassisted and AI-assisted writing to create truly good essays also requires these qualities.

Writing is a craft worthy of enormous respect, one which few of us ever master. But most students don’t aspire to become professional writers. Instead, they are preparing for careers where they will write to further goals beyond the production of writing. As we do today, they will write to communicate, explain, convince, memorialize, request and persuade. AI writing tools, when properly used, will help them do those things better.

When I was a middle and high school student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was told that professional success required good “penmanship” and the ability to perform long division by hand. By the time I entered the professional workforce in the late 1980s, technology advances had rendered those skills obsolete. Education culture can be very slow to change, as evidenced by the fact that many schools today still force children to learn long division—a task they will never have to perform anywhere outside of school. With AI writing, educators should stay ahead of the technology curve, as opposed to lagging decades behind it.

The upshot: I am helping my students to prepare for a future in which AI is simply another technology tool as opposed to a novelty. I am also telling them that they are solely and fully responsible for the writing they turn in bearing their name. If it’s factually inaccurate, that’s on them. If it’s badly organized, that’s on them. If it’s stylistically or logically inconsistent, that’s on them. If it’s partially plagiarized, that means that they have committed plagiarism.

In short, I’m encouraging my students to become responsible, aware users of the AI technologies that will play a profoundly important role over the course of their careers. The AI writing, so to speak, is on the wall.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of  Scientific American.

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Using ChatGPT to Write a College Essay | Tips & Examples

Published on June 26, 2023 by Koen Driessen . Revised on December 8, 2023.

A good college essay helps to distinguish your application from those of other candidates. It conveys your experiences, values, and character traits and indicates why you would make a good addition to the university you’re applying to.

Your college essay should be your own work. However, AI tools like ChatGPT may be helpful during the preparation and revision stages of your writing.

You can also use the essay checker , so you don’t have to revise your writing yourself.

You can use these tools to:

• Brainstorm essay ideas
• Develop an outline
• Generate feedback

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Table of contents

Brainstorming ideas, developing an outline, generating feedback, limitations of using chatgpt, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions.

Your college essay topic should reveal something distinctive about your personality and have a unique angle.

Brainstorming a range of potential ideas is a good place to start. This can help to stimulate creative thinking and prompt self-reflection. It can also help you draw connections between seemingly unrelated experiences or ideas.

You can use ChatGPT to generate questions to help you brainstorm.

Example: Using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas

• Generate 10 questions to help me brainstorm topics for my college admission essay.
• How has a particular life experience shaped your perspective on a specific issue or topic?
• What challenges or obstacles have you faced, and how have they influenced your personal growth?
• How has your involvement in extracurricular activities impacted your character development and contributed to your identity?
• In what ways have you demonstrated leadership skills and made a positive impact on your community?
• Describe a significant academic achievement or project that showcases your intellectual curiosity and passion.
• How have your cultural background and family values influenced your aspirations and goals for the future?
• Reflect on a time when you had to step outside of your comfort zone to achieve a meaningful outcome. What did you learn from this experience?
• How do you envision using your education to make a difference in the world or contribute to a specific field or industry?
• What do you believe sets you apart from other applicants, and how would your unique perspective enrich the college community?
• Discuss a book, artwork, or scientific discovery that has profoundly impacted your thinking and helped shape your intellectual interests.

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College admission essays don’t follow one predefined structure, so you can approach them creatively and incorporate storytelling techniques.

Two common approaches to structuring your essay are the narrative structure (a chronological narrative that shows your character development over time) and the vignette or montage structure (multiple scenes connected by a common topic or theme).

Regardless of the structure you choose, it’s important to establish a coherent narrative and ensure that your essay flows smoothly.

You can use ChatGPT as a source of inspiration and to generate potential ideas on how to structure your college essay . Do this by prompting the tool to create an outline using your chosen topic. You can make the prompt as specific as you like, mentioning any facts or viewpoints that should be incorporated into the output.

Examples: Using ChatGPT to generate an essay outline

• Provide a very short outline for a college admission essay. The essay will be about my experience working at an animal shelter. The essay will be 500 words long.
• Hook: Share a brief and engaging anecdote about your experience at the animal shelter.
• Thesis statement: Working at an animal shelter has been a transformative experience, teaching me valuable lessons about compassion, resilience, and community impact.
• Describe your first impressions and emotions upon starting work at the shelter.
• Discuss the challenges you encountered, such as the condition of the animals or the emotional toll of their situations.
• Highlight the relationships you formed with the animals and their impact on you.
• Discuss specific instances where you witnessed the transformative power of love and care on the animals’ well-being.
• Explore the collaborative efforts within the shelter community.
• Discuss how working with others led to positive outcomes and inspired you to make a difference.
• Reflect on how working at the shelter has shaped your character and values.
• Discuss the skills and lessons learned that are applicable beyond the shelter environment.
• Connect your experiences to your future goals and aspirations.
• Summarize the main points discussed in the essay.
• Reinforce the transformative nature of your experience and your commitment to making a positive impact in the future.

You can use ChatGPT to help revise your essay before submitting it to ensure that it’s of a high quality. However, ChatGPT cannot provide the same kind of informed feedback as a human, and it’s not able to adequately judge qualities such as vulnerability and authenticity. For this reason, it’s important to also ask for feedback from two to three people who have experience with college essays and who know you well.

Nevertheless, you can use ChatGPT to generate feedback on certain aspects, such as consistency of tone, clarity of structure, and grammar and punctuation. You can also use  Scribbr’s free paraphrasing tool to help vary the tone of your writing and Scribbr’s free grammar checker to ensure your text is free of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.

Alternatively, you can seek the advice of a human essay coach or editor. We recommend using Scribbr’s essay editing service .

Example: Using ChatGPT to get feedback

• Provide constructive feedback on how to improve the above essay with regard to appropriateness of tone, clarity of structure, and grammar and punctuation.
• The tone of the essay is generally appropriate, conveying a sense of personal growth and passion. However, consider injecting more enthusiasm and emotion into certain parts of the essay to make it more engaging and captivating.
• The overall structure of the essay is clear and follows a logical progression. However, it would benefit from a stronger introduction that hooks the reader and clearly outlines the main points to be discussed.
• Consider using clear topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph to provide a preview of the main idea or argument that will be presented.
• Pay attention to subject-verb agreement and verb tenses throughout the essay to ensure consistency.
• Proofread the essay to eliminate any repetitive phrases or sentences.
• Check for the correct use of commas and other punctuation marks, ensuring they are used appropriately to enhance clarity and flow.

Additionally, here are a few constructive suggestions for improvement:

• Expand on the ways in which working at the animal shelter influenced your future aspirations and academic/professional pursuits.
• Be mindful of using diverse vocabulary and sentence structures to enhance the overall quality of the essay.

While ChatGPT can help you brainstorm, outline, and revise your essay, having it write your essay for you can negatively impact your application in several ways.

Unoriginal content

ChatGPT responses are based on a wide range of sources and sometimes resemble existing texts. Furthermore, they are not always unique, since other users may receive the same responses to similar prompts.

As the point of a college essay is to showcase your unique experiences and perspective and make you stand out from other candidates, having ChatGPT write your essay is not a good idea.

Formulaic style

ChatGPT outputs don’t reflect your personality, are highly formulaic, and contain many clichés (e.g., outputs often use hackneyed phrases like “burning desire,” “insatiable curiosity,” and “thirst for knowledge”).

Furthermore, ChatGPT outputs often “tell” rather than “show” (i.e., they state a fact instead of illustrating it using examples and vivid imagery).

Lack of personal insight

Human-written text tends to be more unpredictable and contain more creative language choices than AI-generated writing.

While the connections you make in your writing should not be nonsensical, drawing unique and unexpected connections between different experiences can help show character development and display your creativity and critical thinking skills.

ChatGPT can’t do this. Furthermore, it can’t express authentic emotion or vulnerability about specific memories that are, after all, your memories, not ChatGPT’s.

Risk of plagiarism

Passing off AI-generated text as your own work is usually considered plagiarism (or at least academic dishonesty ). AI detectors may be used to detect this offense.

It’s highly unlikely that a university will accept your application if you are caught submitting an AI-generated college essay.

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If you want more tips on using AI tools , understanding plagiarism , and citing sources , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations, examples, and formats.

• Citing ChatGPT
• Best grammar checker
• Best paraphrasing tool
• ChatGPT in your studies
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Best plagiarism checker

Citing sources

• Citation styles
• In-text citation
• Citation examples
• Annotated bibliography

No, having ChatGPT write your college essay can negatively impact your application in numerous ways. ChatGPT outputs are unoriginal and lack personal insight.

Furthermore, Passing off AI-generated text as your own work is considered academically dishonest . AI detectors may be used to detect this offense, and it’s highly unlikely that any university will accept you if you are caught submitting an AI-generated admission essay.

However, you can use ChatGPT to help write your college essay during the preparation and revision stages (e.g., for brainstorming ideas and generating feedback).

Yes, you use ChatGPT to help write your college essay by having it generate feedback on certain aspects of your work (consistency of tone, clarity of structure, etc.).

However, ChatGPT is not able to adequately judge qualities like vulnerability and authenticity. For this reason, it’s important to also ask for feedback from people who have experience with college essays and who know you well. Alternatively, you can get advice using Scribbr’s essay editing service .

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Driessen, K. (2023, December 08). Using ChatGPT to Write a College Essay | Tips & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved July 8, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/ai-tools/chatgpt-college-essay/

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A new AI chatbot might do your homework for you. But it's still not an A+ student

Emma Bowman

Enter a prompt into ChatGPT, and it becomes your very own virtual assistant. OpenAI/Screenshot by NPR hide caption

Enter a prompt into ChatGPT, and it becomes your very own virtual assistant.

Why do your homework when a chatbot can do it for you? A new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT has thrilled the Internet with its superhuman abilities to solve math problems, churn out college essays and write research papers.

After the developer OpenAI released the text-based system to the public last month, some educators have been sounding the alarm about the potential that such AI systems have to transform academia, for better and worse.

"AI has basically ruined homework," said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, on Twitter.

The tool has been an instant hit among many of his students, he told NPR in an interview on Morning Edition , with its most immediately obvious use being a way to cheat by plagiarizing the AI-written work, he said.

Academic fraud aside, Mollick also sees its benefits as a learning companion.

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He's used it as his own teacher's assistant, for help with crafting a syllabus, lecture, an assignment and a grading rubric for MBA students.

"You can paste in entire academic papers and ask it to summarize it. You can ask it to find an error in your code and correct it and tell you why you got it wrong," he said. "It's this multiplier of ability, that I think we are not quite getting our heads around, that is absolutely stunning," he said.

A convincing — yet untrustworthy — bot

But the superhuman virtual assistant — like any emerging AI tech — has its limitations. ChatGPT was created by humans, after all. OpenAI has trained the tool using a large dataset of real human conversations.

"The best way to think about this is you are chatting with an omniscient, eager-to-please intern who sometimes lies to you," Mollick said.

It lies with confidence, too. Despite its authoritative tone, there have been instances in which ChatGPT won't tell you when it doesn't have the answer.

That's what Teresa Kubacka, a data scientist based in Zurich, Switzerland, found when she experimented with the language model. Kubacka, who studied physics for her Ph.D., tested the tool by asking it about a made-up physical phenomenon.

"I deliberately asked it about something that I thought that I know doesn't exist so that they can judge whether it actually also has the notion of what exists and what doesn't exist," she said.

ChatGPT produced an answer so specific and plausible sounding, backed with citations, she said, that she had to investigate whether the fake phenomenon, "a cycloidal inverted electromagnon," was actually real.

When she looked closer, the alleged source material was also bogus, she said. There were names of well-known physics experts listed – the titles of the publications they supposedly authored, however, were non-existent, she said.

"This is where it becomes kind of dangerous," Kubacka said. "The moment that you cannot trust the references, it also kind of erodes the trust in citing science whatsoever," she said.

Scientists call these fake generations "hallucinations."

"There are still many cases where you ask it a question and it'll give you a very impressive-sounding answer that's just dead wrong," said Oren Etzioni, the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI , who ran the research nonprofit until recently. "And, of course, that's a problem if you don't carefully verify or corroborate its facts."

Users experimenting with the chatbot are warned before testing the tool that ChatGPT "may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information." OpenAI/Screenshot by NPR hide caption

An opportunity to scrutinize AI language tools

Users experimenting with the free preview of the chatbot are warned before testing the tool that ChatGPT "may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information," harmful instructions or biased content.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, said earlier this month it would be a mistake to rely on the tool for anything "important" in its current iteration. "It's a preview of progress," he tweeted .

The failings of another AI language model unveiled by Meta last month led to its shutdown. The company withdrew its demo for Galactica, a tool designed to help scientists, just three days after it encouraged the public to test it out, following criticism that it spewed biased and nonsensical text.

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Similarly, Etzioni says ChatGPT doesn't produce good science. For all its flaws, though, he sees ChatGPT's public debut as a positive. He sees this as a moment for peer review.

"ChatGPT is just a few days old, I like to say," said Etzioni, who remains at the AI institute as a board member and advisor. It's "giving us a chance to understand what he can and cannot do and to begin in earnest the conversation of 'What are we going to do about it?' "

The alternative, which he describes as "security by obscurity," won't help improve fallible AI, he said. "What if we hide the problems? Will that be a recipe for solving them? Typically — not in the world of software — that has not worked out."