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It started innocently enough. An attractive classmate in English class at North Central High School confided that her last term paper was marked C-. She thrust her work on my desk. That C- was a gift.
I was moved to offer some assistance. Did I say she was attractive? I never intended to completely write her papers and certainly not to receive compensation for my services.
In the next moment, I found myself pocketing $20 cash for each of her next two assignments. Twenty dollars—that’s a date for dinner at the TeePee drive-in and a movie plus three tanks of gas. It beat aggravating my asthma by pushing a lawnmower back and forth or laboring at my dad’s junkyard where I didn’t know a Ford from a Chevrolet.
Just two or three hours at the library and I had reports for which I guaranteed at least a B. I was free to write about anything that interested me. For my first effort, I chose “The Disappearance of the Passenger Pigeon.”
My 16-year-old brain never contemplated the significance of ghost writing a term paper nor the ramifications of detection for this diabolical act. Had I been my co-conspirator’s English teacher I would have inquired how her student managed to improve her writing skills from C- to B+ in such a hurry. We never got caught, and now it’s too late to turn myself in.
I had not thought about my malfeasance until the other day when I learned high school students are benefitting from surreptitiously written assignments by an app called ChatGPT. GPT is short for generative pre-trained transformer, a natural language processing tool. This tool allows you to have human-like conversations as opposed to a search engine that indexes web pages on the internet to help you find the information you request.
Although, the app has been available less than a year, it has garnered more than 100 million users, making it the fastest growing consumer application of all time. It is far more versatile than merely composing high school writing assignments. It can write business pitches, compose music and poetry and do about anything but shine your shoes. Before long it will eliminate jobs.
My equally guilty classmate would now be an 80-year-old grandmother who is not the least bit interested in the term papers. (She wasn’t then.) I am out of that business, but just for fun, I took advantage of a three-day free trial and asked my new friend ChatGPT to write a paper on the disappearance of the passenger pigeon.
In six seconds, ChatGPT produced a report superior to mine. Did you know the last-known passenger pigeon named Martha died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. Like Martha, I went extinct on the term paper circuit. That was almost 50 years after Martha’s demise.
ChatGPT is not perfect. Sometimes it will compose incorrect or nonsensical answers. The pros call this behavior “hallucination.” The app is also limited to events that occurred prior to September 2021. This powerful tool is likely to have an adverse effect on our ability to think and create. No wonder journalists, educators and ethicists have expressed alarm and a number of universities have prohibited ChatGPT in their classes and assignments.
In spite of my teenage misbehavior, I have no regrets. Well, maybe one. My price was $20. ChatGPT is now estimated to be worth $29 billion.•
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Maurer is a shareholder in IBJ Media.
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The lesson I learned from this is that all ChatGPT is going to do at school is put the people writing papers for others out of business (or perhaps make them more efficient).
Schools should teach how to use ChatGPT to the benefit of learning. It can be an amazing tool. People will likely need to know how to prompt language models like ChatGPT in a few years the same way being able to properly conduct a Google search is important now.
Yes, and the expansion of television programming (now streaming) was going to be a boon to the education of the public. How did that work out?!