AI Program ChatGPT presents useful resource to students, educators warn against cheating

Matthew Burkhart Staff Writer

ChatGPT, an artificially intelligent chatbot created by OpenAI, has sparked discussion and debates among educators about its potential uses and implications in the field of education and whether its use constitutes academic dishonesty.

“ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI,” ChatGPT responded when prompted to describe itself. “It is trained on a dataset of conversational text and is designed to generate human-like responses to text-based prompts. It can be used for tasks such as language translation, text summarization, question answering and text generation.”

Thomas Hardiman, director of the Office of Student Conduct, said ChatGPT can be a very useful tool if used correctly, with some professors at NC State expressing interest in using the program in their curricula in the future.

“I anticipate that in the years to come, you are going to see certain disciplines train their students on how to use [ChatGPT] effectively because it is going to be a tool that is used in that discipline and in that professional world,” Hardiman said.

ChatGPT can be used to generate anything from essays to lines of code. By detecting patterns from thousands of examples on the internet, ChatGPT produces professional, near-perfect results. Hardiman said it’s too perfect.