— tech — 2 min read
As someone who considers themselves technical, I was surprisingly behind on the discovery of ChatGPT. I've heard of it, even seen videos about it, but never actually used it. I was stuck in this mindset that it was "just another thing." A thing that I had boiled down to a gimmick or fad.
This mindset continued until I realized that the hype didn't seem to die down. People started getting more and more excited as they found new ways to leverage the power of AI. "FINE," in a moment of defeat I thought. "Let's see what everyone is talking about."
I was blown away. This application seemed to be so magical. I then started to think about the sheer volume of training data that this must have been trained on, which made it that much cooler! Imagining the possibilities of this amount of training + data is really exciting. A chat bot is an extremely approachable way to share the joys of AI and ML with the world and am interested to see where we go from here.
One of the most interesting use cases I've seen from ChatGPT is writing code! After seeing a TikTok about this, I KNEW I had to give this a try and while it wasn't perfect, it was really close. I quickly learned that the exact phrasing, ordering, and words I typed into the prompt made a significant difference.
The debate now turns to academic integrity or even integrity as a whole. I'm not quite sure how to think about the use of this tool in conjunction with a coding assignment, for example, but it does raise an interesting question- is this cheating? If a student is able to write the program in pseudocode and have ChatGPT translate that into code, does that meet the requirements of the assignment? In my experience, having the practice of actually writing the functions and gaining a deep understanding of how all the pieces work together is invaluable. I'd imagine professors will have a tougher time policing this, and it will be down to the student's individual ethics to avoid falling in the trap of using tools to find shortcuts to learning.
All in all, ChatGPT is incredible and a great innovation in the world of AI/ML, but not without its consequences. Just like any new technology, we all need to catch up to readjust our standards, rules, and expectations for what this innovation can bring.