A Letter From the Editors
Humans have generations upon generations of experience with writing. For centuries, writing has been a way to share ideas, communicate emotions and connect with others. But in 2023, these powers are being relinquished to robots.
One of the primary issues with ChatGPT is the lack of sincerity in its writing. From letters to novels, human writing conveys personality and experience, neither of which AI can successfully emulate. In a yearlong competition hosted by Dartmouth College, a panel of ten judges were shown six poems written by humans and four poems written by two different computer algorithms. The judges easily differentiated between human poetry and AI poetry, proving that AI cannot communicate authenticity as humans can. In the end, results showed that AI algorithms are incapable of replicating the art of writing.
That being said, updated versions of ChatGPT now have the ability to incorporate emotional vocabulary into its writing in a startlingly accurate way. With this recent development, users are utilizing the bot to write anything from personal statements to wedding vows. This shifts the problem of sincerity onto the users themselves. Does a thank-you letter written by ChatGPT hold any value? Any ounce of sincerity? Using AI for situations like this defeats the purpose of having kind gestures in the first place.
Even OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has been desperately trying to downplay his own hit product. Altman took to Twitter, calling ChatGPT “incredibly limited” and warning users “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.” Originally, OpenAI was planning on releasing the chatbot in early 2023, but in a worried frenzy at the fact that competitors may release before them, the company decided that just 13 days would be enough to debut ChatGPT– 13 days to develop their latest version of a chatbot that over 100 million users accessed within its first two months in the public domain.
Already, there have been countless stories of AI detectors exposing students for using chatbots to write papers, bringing upon them the consequences of plagiarism. As students increasingly rely on AI for assignments, they miss out on valuable skills that the assignments are designed to teach students. It’s not just an issue of neglecting integrity, but also an issue of hindering language development. Students forfeit their understanding of academic content while losing the ability to communicate effectively.
ChatGPT’s powerful abilities have severe consequences for generations of students, pulling apart the fabric of integrity that holds together the academic system and society as a whole. In order to avoid hindering our growth, we cannot use AI and allow it to think, write, and act for us.