What do you think about ChatGPT?

[davewill]

This isn't the first time we've faced this sort of thing. Calculators were once seen as a cheat device that would make math homework useless. Online search engines made plagiarism much more common, but also helped teachers detect it.

People have probably been buying term papers to cheat for hundreds of years. Some people will try to use AI to cheat, and some will get away with it. A lot of others will get caught, either through automated anti-cheat tools, or by teachers who discover that the student doesn't really know what their paper says, or that the quality of writing doesn't match what they do on in class assignments.

Personally, I think we'll all end up using it for mundane tasks. I've seen programmers online use it to generate small code snippets, or small custom tools. Need a macro to generate that end of the month report? Why not have the AI do it?

In the short term, I think most people won't use what they get out of the bot unchanged, but eventually, they will get so good that they will mimic your own writing style or write code so good that it makes no sense to write it yourself. I think much like some people are skilled at finding what they need in a search engine, being able to coax the right output from a chatbot will become a valuable skill.