Source: https://www-nature-com.ezproxy.mdx.ac.

uk/articles/d41586-022-04397-7

NEWS EXPLAINER
09 December 2022

AI bot ChatGPT writes smart

essays — should professors
worry?
The bot is free for now and can produce uncannily
natural, well-referenced writing in response to
homework questions.
Chris Stokel-Walker

Educational assessment might need a rethink in the wake of ChatGPT.

Credit: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty

Between overwork, underpayment and the pressure to

publish, academics have plenty to worry about. Now
there’s a fresh concern: ChatGPT, an artificial
intelligence (AI) powered chatbot that creates
surprisingly intelligent-sounding text in response to
user prompts, including homework assignments and
exam-style questions. The replies are so lucid, well-
researched and decently referenced that some academics
are calling the bot the death knell for conventional forms
of educational assessment. How worried should
professors and lecturers be?
“At the moment, it’s looking a lot like the end of essays
as an assignment for education,” says Lilian Edwards,
who studies law, innovation and society at Newcastle
University, UK. Dan Gillmor, a journalism scholar at
Arizona State University in Tempe, told newspaper The
Guardian that he had fed ChatGPT a homework question
that he often assigns his students — and the article it
produced in response would have earned a student a
good grade.

ChatGPT is the brainchild of AI firm OpenAI, based in

San Francisco, California. In 2020, the company
unleashed GPT-3, a type of AI known as a large
language model that creates text by trawling through
billions of words of training data and learning how
words and phrases relate to each other. GPT-3 is in the
vanguard of a revolution in AI, sparking philosophical
questions about its limits and prompting a host of
potential applications, from summarizing legal
documents to aiding computer programmers. ChatGPT
is fine-tuned from an advanced version of GPT-3 and is
optimized to engage in dialogue with users.

Avoiding the rabbit hole

Whereas GPT-3 was relatively cold and computer-like,
ChatGPT can act almost as a collaborator off which
users can bounce ideas. “From what I’ve seen of this, it’s
so good because it doesn’t run off down a rabbit hole
nearly as much as GPT-3 previously did,” says
Edwards. “I just think essay assessment is dead, really.”

Others disagree that ChatGPT is such a game changer,

noting that students have long been able to outsource
essay writing to human third parties through ‘essay
mills’. “It doesn't necessarily add much functionality
that wasn’t available to students already if they knew
where to look,” says Thomas Lancaster, a computer
scientist and academic-integrity researcher at Imperial
College London.

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Lancaster acknowledges that ChatGPT puts everything

into a neat free package. But he thinks that ChatGPT-
generated essays will out themselves more readily than
the products of essay mills, by including quotes that
weren’t actually said, incorrect information created
through false assumptions, and irrelevant references.

“Despite the words ‘artificial intelligence’ being thrown

about, really, these systems don’t have intelligence in
the way we might think about as humans,” he says.
“They’re trained to generate a pattern of words based on
patterns of words they’ve seen before.”

Beyond the essay

Even if this is the end of essays as an assessment tool,
that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, says Arvind
Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University
in New Jersey. He says essays are used to test both a
student’s knowledge and their writing skills. “ChatGPT
is going to make it hard to combine these two into one
form of written assignment,” he says. But academics
could respond by reworking written assessments to
prioritize critical thinking or reasoning that ChatGPT
can’t yet do. This might ultimately encourage students
to think for themselves more, rather than to try and
answer essay prompts, he says.

How necessary that will be depends on how many

people use the chatbot. More than one million
people tried it out in its first week. But although the
current version, which OpenAI calls a “research
preview”, is available at no cost, it’s unlikely to be free
forever, and some students might baulk at the idea of
paying.

The situation both worries and excites Sandra Wachter,

who studies technology and regulation at the Oxford
Internet Institute, UK. “I’m really impressed by the
capability,” she says. But she’s concerned about the
potential effect on human knowledge and ability. If
students start to use ChatGPT, they will be outsourcing
not only their writing, but also their thinking.

She’s hopeful that education providers will adapt.

“Whenever there’s a new technology, there’s a panic
around it,” she says. “It’s the responsibility of academics
to have a healthy amount of distrust — but I don’t feel
like this is an insurmountable challenge.”

doi: https://doi-org.ezproxy.mdx.ac.uk/10.1038/d41586-022-
04397-7