By Kalhan Rosenblatt -
NBC News
Following its viral launch last week, the ChatGPT chatbot was hailed across the internet as a spectacular step forward for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the future potential of online search.
But this praise also raised concerns about its possible use in academic settings.
Could the chatbot, which offers coherent, quirky, and conversational answers to simple questions, encourage more students to cheat?
Students have been copying their work over the internet for decades, giving rise to tools designed to check whether their work was original.
But now it is feared that ChatGPT will make those resources obsolete.
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Some have already tested on the internet if it is possible to make the bot complete a task.
“holyyyy I solved my networking homework using chatGPT,” one person tweeted, later clarifying that the homework was old.
Others suggested that its existence could spell the death of university writing.
One technologist went so far as to say that with ChatGPT, "the university as we know it will cease to exist."
The artificial intelligence company OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on concerns about cheating.
However, several experts who teach in the field of AI and the humanities said that the chatbot, while impressive, is not something they are ready to sound the alarm about in regards to possible widespread cheating by students.
"We're not there, but we're not that far either," said Andrew Piper, Professor of Language, Literature and Culture and Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling at McGill University.
"We're not at the stage where all of a sudden [AI] writes a bunch of student essays and no one is able to tell the difference," he reiterated.
Piper and other experts who spoke with NBC News, sister network to Noticias Telemundo, compared the fear of cheating and ChatGPT to concerns that arose when the calculator was invented, when people thought it would be the death of humans learning math.
Lauren Klein, an associate professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, went so far as to compare panic to the philosopher Plato's fear that writing would dissolve human memory.
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“There has always been a concern that technologies kill what people do best, and the reality is that people have had to learn how to use these technologies to improve what they do best,” Klein said.
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Academic institutions will have to get creative and find ways to integrate new technologies like ChatGPT into their curricula, just as they did during the calculator boom, Piper said.
In reality, AI tools like ChatGPT could be used to improve education, according to Paul Fyfe, associate professor of English at North Carolina State University.
According to him, there are many possibilities for collaboration between AI and educators.
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“It's important to talk about this right now and include students in the conversation,” Fyfe says.
"Instead of trying to legislate up front that this is weird and scary, so we have to shut it down."
And some teachers are already embracing AI programs in the classroom.
Piper, who runs .txtlab, a research lab on artificial intelligence and storytelling, says she has had her students analyze writing with AI and has found that they can often tell which papers have been written by a machine and which by a human.
As for educators concerned about the rise of AI, Fyfe and Piper say the technology is already being used in many facets of education.
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Computer-assisted writing tools like Grammarly or Google Doc's Smart Compose already exist, and many students have been using them for a long time.
Platforms like Grammarly and Chegg also offer plagiarism checking tools, so both students and teachers can assess whether an essay has been, in whole or in part, taken from another site.
A Grammarly spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
A Chegg spokesman declined to comment.
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Those who spoke to NBC News said they aren't aware of any technology that would detect if an AI wrote an essay, but they predict someone will soon capitalize on building that technology.
For now, Piper says the best defense against AI-written essays is for teachers to get to know their students and their writing style to spot discrepancies in the work they turn in.
When an AI reaches the level of meeting all the requirements of academic assignments, and if students use that technology to speed through college, Piper warned, that could do a great disservice to student education.
For now, he suggested older technology to combat fears of students using ChatGPT to cheat.
“It will rekindle the love for pencil and paper,” he said.