AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays -- should professors worry?

Educational assessment might need a rethink in the wake of ChatGPT.Credit: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty Between overwork, underpayment and the pressure to publish, academics have plenty to worry about. Now there's a fresh concern: ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot that creates surprisingly intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts, including homework assignments and exam-style questions. The replies are so lucid, well-researched and decently referenced that some academics are calling the bot the death knell for conventional forms of educational assessment. How worried should professors and lecturers be? "At the moment, it's looking a lot like the end of essays as an assignment for education," says Lilian Edwards, who studies law, innovation and society at Newcastle University, UK. Dan Gillmor, a journalism scholar at Arizona State University in Tempe, told newspaper The Guardian that he had fed ChatGPT a homework question that he often assigns his students -- and the article it produced in response would have earned a student a good grade. ChatGPT is the brainchild of AI firm OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California.