PROFESSORS VS. AI

“The wolf is at the door,” read the New York Post while covering ChatGPT. Since its release, ChatGPT has been a source of excitement and anxiety in the educational landscape. Many see it as the future of writing, but the question has to be asked: could ChatGPT even pass as a student at Messiah?

What is it?

ChatGPT, an AI language processing model developed by OpenAI, is able to respond to prompts from users with original sentences near instantaneously. Even more impressive, these responses sound human.

Nathan Bos is a cognitive psychologist, lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and Principal Collaborative AI Engineer at MITRE. According to Bos, ChatGPT emerged from recent developments in AI research, allowing ChatGPT to scan the mass amounts of text available on the internet, process it contextually, and respond logically.

“One thing we [previously] really never asked language models to do because they were so horrible at it was just produce text,” Bos said of ChatGPT’s predecessors. Now, versions later, ChatGPT has been polished, and could potentially revolutionize writing.

How did it do?

To test ChatGPT’s writing abilities, assignments were gathered from three Messiah professors from various disciplines: marketing, philosophy, and English. Each of the submitted prompts were run through ChatGPT, then graded by their respective professors.

Keith Quesenberry, associate professor of marketing, has been testing ChatGPT with his students. In doing so, Quesenberry has been impressed by ChatGPT's ability to mimic human writing.

However, when matched up with a situational analysis from his Principles of Marketing class, ChatGPT was less impressive. For starters, ChatGPT struggled with accurately responding to the prompt, missing out on clearly marked word count and content requirements.

While it would often cite what appeared to be correct sources, what the AI was actually doing was pulling information from one source to complete the piece analyzing the audio market, then pulling seemingly relevant sources into its references.

According to Quesenberry, ChatGPT’s solid structure, research, and select paragraphs only got it so far.

“With the missing requirements, sections and overall lack of understanding of the streaming audio market I would have to give this a D,” Quesenberry said.

For its philosophy credit, ChatGPT was put against three prompts from Eric Deitch, adjunct instructor of philosophy. Deitch asked the AI to explain how to evaluate ChatGPT’s effectiveness, to explain philosophy, and the concept