Questions abound around the use of ChatGPT in doing homework, writing academic essays and cheating in exams.

“It’s a new world. Goodbye homework!” That was Elon Musk’s tweeted response to news that some New York-based colleges are planning to ban the use of ChatGPT to complete homework and are concerned about “negative impacts on student learning and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.” As a part of the measure, systems linked to university servers will not open the ChatGPT website.

It’s a new world. Goodbye homework!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 5, 2023

Interestingly, ChatGPT has become sophisticated enough to conjure up very convincing and plausible academic essays, raising questions regarding plagiarism and students taking a “quick-and-dirty” method to fulfil their responsibilities without the adequate effort essential for their education.

New York City schools confirmed to CNN that students and teachers would be banned from using the AI bot on the district’s networks and devices.

Jenna Lyle, the deputy press secretary for the New York public schools, said in a statement: “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

Enter Edward Tian, a computer science student at Princeton.

Tian has developed an app called GPTZero that can “quickly and efficiently” label whether an essay was written by a person or ChatGPT, exposing plagiarism. (Polygon)

Meanwhile, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), one of the world’s most prestigious machine learning conferences, has banned the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT for writing scientific papers. (The Verge)

“Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis,” said ICML in a policy announcement.

Related Story: Microsoft To Integrate ChatGPT’s Tech Into Bing For “Conversational” Search

Image by Pexels from Pixabay