Is ChatGPT Massively Used by Students Nowadays? A Survey on the Use of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT in Educational Settings

Few inventions and innovations have genuinely transformed education at large, particularly by enhancing access to knowledge. Notable among these are the advent of writing around 3300 BCE, which facilitated the transmission of knowledge across generations and cultures; the Gutenberg printing press in approximately 1440 CE, which greatly simplified the duplication and dissemination of ideas and knowledge, thereby encouraging wider literacy and education; the large-scale deployment of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which allowed for rapid, affordable, and accessible information sharing via the Internet, especially through online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia; and, more recently, the public emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) [1] in 2022, such as ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) [2], which have made information access even more straightforward. However, LLMs differ from previous inventions that facilitated the spread of information and knowledge in several key ways [3, 4]. While writing, the printing press, and the Internet primarily made information more accessible, LLMs provide an array of additional functions, such as multi-language translation, summarisation, simplification of complex information, and advanced writing capabilities to structure and organise content. In other words, LLMs assist people not only with accessing information but also with tasks traditionally considered cognitive.