If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT yet, you’ve probably been living under a rock.
A very, very dense rock. Probably with sound cancellation.
But in case you haven’t heard, the controversial, ground-breaking new technology ChatGPT has been making headlines namely for the AI bot’s uncanny ability to produce seemingly any kind of text from a simple, single user prompt, whether that’s an essay or assignment, to tweets, website content and even legal contracts.
And it makes it look like a real person wrote it.
Needless to say the controversial technology, which was created by OpenAI (a San Francisco-based research lab that has been funded by the likes of Elon Musk and Silicon Valley ‘mega doner’ Peter Thiel) is making educators, writers, content producers, marketing professionals, artists and musicians nervous.
Very nervous.
Even Silicon Valley is freaking out, according to one of Valuetainment’s most recent YouTube videos titled “Silicone Valley people will lose their jobs” – Reaction to OpenAI Being a $29 Billion Company.
While the video primarily discusses how ChatGPT is going to reshape pretty much every industry on the planet, Harvard-educated American astrophysicist and science commentator Neil deGrasse Tyson – who’s famous for popularising science with his books and documentaries, provided some pretty nuanced insight into the technology’s capacity to facilitate cheating and its impact on students.
And he provided a pretty harsh warning to students thinking about doing it.
“The question is, why would you cheat at all?” deGrasse Tyson said.
“People who cheat on exams, do so because the system values your grade more than the student values learning,” deGrasse Tyson said, repeating an assertion he tweeted about almost a decade ago.
“(People cheat) to get a good grade, so that the schooling system thinks more highly of you,” he said.
“But the thing is, being in school is about learning. So if you have the AI bot create your papers… you didn’t learn a thing.”
And this is deGrasse Tyson’s biggest problem with using AI bots like ChatGPT.
“(It signals to us that) the value we put on a grade is out of proportion with who you actually are and who you become in life,” he says.
“So yeah, students can submit papers using ChatGPT. But you’ll be an idiot at the end of your schooling. And you’ll have gotten a degree because you fooled the system.”
Perhaps most importantly, says deGrasse Tyson, students need to be asking themselves: did you fool yourselves, too?
