ChatGPT has not been around for an exceedingly long time, but it is becoming very widely used by students. ChatGPT is owned and developed by an AI research and deployment company, OpenAI. It was founded by a highly intelligent group of people, which includes Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Jessica Livingston, and Linkedin cofounder, Reid Hoffman. The program is based on the GPT-3.5 architecture, which was actually released in 2021, but ChatGPT itself is something more recently developed; its exact creation date is not known to the public.

According to ChatGPT itself, “While OpenAI has several offices around the world, its headquarters and main research facilities are located in San Francisco, where ChatGPT was most likely developed.” The program is a large language model that was trained by OpenAI; the data that it was programmed with and taught is the only things it knows. The AI tries its best to spit its information out in the most human-like response. The AI cannot browse the internet, so if it does not know the answer to something, there is nothing anyone could do but wait for a newer development.

According to an article published by GT Net, “ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks like composing emails, essays, and code.” This program is one of the most useful tools someone can have access to. The assistance this program offers is almost endless and could be considered the one of the most helpful technologies created by humans so far; however, it opens a lot of doors to cheating and using it in that way can be considered plagiarism.

One of the biggest issues this AI causes is that it allows students to be able to cheat on written assignments by having ChatGPT write something in seconds. With just a few clicks on a screen, words can be thrown out. Mr. Philipsen, English teacher, said that, “We all want to default and say that students are just lazy, and I think that’s part of it, but there are students who legitimately do just struggle, and they are afraid of failing, or students take on too much and they are just busy. They use it to stay afloat. It is an easy way to get an assignment done.”

There are many ways to catch a student using this program, but luckily for the staff at Coronado, they have Turnitin.com. This program allows teachers to easily check how AI generated their text is. The consequences of getting caught make it seem not even worth it to use. Mr. Philipsen also said, “So far for me I’m treating it the same as plagiarism. I teach a writing class, so if that’s not your writing, immediate zero.”

Mr. Lobato, the Dean of Students at Coronado, said that, “It is an easy way to cut corners, but teachers are catching it. I would leave it up to the teacher first, tell them to give them a zero since they were caught cheating. If it happens again then we would decide on a real consequence, as of now, taking a zero is good enough.”

Although it is nice to get your work done quickly and have it all typed out for you, is it worth all the consequences? Is taking the easy way out worth the chance of getting caught? Just do the work, save yourself from the zero.