You're Not Going to Like How Colleges Respond to That Chatbot That Writes Papers

In the classroom of the future--if there still are any--it's easy to imagine the endpoint of an arms race: an artificial intelligence that generates the day's lessons and prompts, a student-deployed A.I. that will surreptitiously do the assignment, and finally, a third-party A.I. that will determine if any of the pupils actually did the work with their own fingers and brain. Loop complete; no humans needed. If you were to take all the hype about ChatGPT at face value, this might feel inevitable. But a response to the hit software demo, released by OpenAI in November to instant fanfare, is coming. You only have to look at how schools dealt with the potential externalities of newly essential tech during the pandemic to see how a similarly paranoid reaction to chatbots like ChatGPT could go--and how it shouldn't. When schools had to shift on the fly to remote learning three years ago, there was a massive turn to what at that point was mainly enterprise software: Zoom.