What the Tech: App used for cheating in school

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - School districts around the country are scrambling to keep students from using a chatbot to do their homework.

One educator says ChatGPT is like a calculator for writing essays. But, how good is ChatGPT at creating long speeches and papers?

ChatGPT - short for “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer” - is a machine-learning model that uses deep-learning techniques to generate human-like text. It has the ability to complete a given prompt or answer questions, making it a powerful tool for tasks such as language translation, conversation simulation, and text summarization.

How good is it? In the video above, everything I said was not written by me, but by ChatGPT. I just entered, “create a television news report about ChatGPT.”

That’s the worry for educators.

ChatGPT sounds so much like a real human, it’s difficult to know if a student really wrote the paper, or just entered a prompt.

I tried several things, asking it to write a 500-word essay on Abraham Lincoln, which it immediately did in a matter of seconds. I entered “write a country song”, which it did with verses, a chorus, and a bridge. It wrote a 200-word explanation of artificial intelligence - in French. It even created an essay on President Ronald Reagan and included citations.

Of course, it isn’t just for cheating in school. It can come up with lesson plans, write resume cover letters, and carry on a conversation about anything.

ChatGPT is a website but in the past few months, developers have flooded the app stores with apps that require paid subscriptions. These are not from the ChatGPT developer. And, it’s difficult to use the website sometimes because so many people around the world are asking it to do things.

It is fun to use, and quite amazing really, another example of how it’s getting more and more difficult to determine whether something is real, or artificial intelligence

Beware of any smartphone apps that are popping up in the app stores. Those could not only take your personal information but might also install malware on your device.

It’s best to only use the ChatGPT website if you want to try it for yourself.

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