Nestled within yesterday's Supreme Court decision declaring that race-conscious admissions programs, like those at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, are unconstitutional is a crucial carveout: Colleges are free to consider "an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life." In other words, they can weigh a candidate's race when it is mentioned in an admissions essay. Observers had already speculated about personal essays becoming invaluable tools for candidates who want to express their racial background without checking a box--now it is clear that the end of affirmative action will transform not only how colleges select students, but also how teenagers advertise themselves to colleges. For essays and statements to provide a workaround for pursuing diversity, applicants must first cast themselves as diverse. The American Council on Education, a nonprofit focused on the impacts of public policy on higher education, recently convened a panel dedicated to planning for the demise of affirmative action; admissions directors and consultants emphasized the need "to educate students about how to write about who they are in a very different way," expressing their "full authentic story" and "trials and tribulations."

That's what the software concluded about a student's paper. One of the professors in the academic program I direct had come across this finding and asked me what to do with it. Then another one saw the same result--100 percent AI--for a different paper by that student, and also wondered: What does this mean? The problem breaks down into more problems: whether it's possible to know for certain that a student used AI, what it even means to "use" AI for writing papers, and when that use amounts to cheating. The software that had flagged our student's papers was also multilayered: Canvas, our courseware system, was running Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service, which had recently installed a new AI-detection algorithm.

The writing sounded like the typical 3 a.m. It was the sort of paper that usually makes me wonder: Did this student even come to class? Did I communicate anything of any value to them at all? Except there were no obvious tells that this was the product of an all-nighter: no grammar errors, misspellings, or departures into the extraneous examples that seem profound to students late at night but definitely sound like the product of a bong hit in the light of day. Perhaps, just before the end of the semester, I was seeing my very first student essay written by ChatGPT?

You tell the model what to do through a textual interface, and the model tries to accomplish the task. What you tell the model to do in a broad sense is the prompt. In the case of image generation AI models such as DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion, the prompt is mainly a description of the image you want to generate. In the case of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 or ChatGPT the prompt can contain anything from a simple question ("Who is the president of the US?") to a complicated problem with all kinds of data inserted in the prompt (note that you can even input a CSV file with raw data as part of the input). It can also be a vague statement such as "Tell me a joke. Even more generally, in generative task oriented models such as Gato, the prompt can be extremely high level and define a task you need help with ("I need to organize a one week trip to Greece"). For the rest of this document, and for now, we will focus on the specific use case of prompts for LLMs. In order to obtain a result, either 1 or 2 must be present. Let's see a few examples (all of them using ChatGPT). Beyond asking a simple question, possibly the next level of sophistication in a prompt is to include some instructions on how the model should answer the question. Here I ask for advice on how to write a college essay, but also include instructions on the different aspects I am interested to hear about in the answer. "How should I write my college admission essay?

I know what you're thinking. "Another article about ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the artificial intelligence wonder-bot from OpenAI, and how it is going to revolutionize society, work, education, and more." Perhaps it will, but that is not this article. The rise of this extraordinary technology, rather than muddling it, makes it clearer than ever what constitutes authenticity. If you or your child are applying to college, you have undoubtedly heard an admission officer talk about authenticity.

An updated version of artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI on November 30. Its ability to write in an intelligent and human-like manner left users impressed -- and also a little bit frightened. People have used ChatGPT to write entire blocks of code, television scripts, and even complete academic essays -- sparking fears that students might use the bot to cheat their way to an easy A. "We're witnessing the death of the college essay in realtime," said one user on Twitter. But some college professors aren't that concerned. "I'm not a huge fan of the gloom and doom," said Professor Stuart Selber, who teaches English at Pennsylvania State University.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. OpenAI's impressive new artificial-intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, has intensified the debate over what the rise of AI-generated writing and art means for work, culture, education, and more. "You don't need a wild imagination to see that the future cracked open by these technologies is full of awful and awesome possibilities," our staff writer Derek Thompson recently wrote. I called Derek to explore some of those possibilities. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Artificial intelligence: What is ChatGPT? Will artificial intelligence lead to plagiarism?

Move over Siri and Alexa, there's a new AI in town and it's ready to steal the show--or at least make you laugh with its clever quips and witty responses. That is how ChatGPT, the powerful chatbot released last week by the AI company OpenAI, suggested that I begin this story about ChatGPT. The chatbot isn't exactly new; it's an updated version of GPT-3, which has been around since 2020, released to solicit feedback to improve the chatbot's safety and functionality. But it is the most powerful to date to be made widely available to the public. It's also very easy to use.

Every year, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI improves its text-writing bot, GPT. And every year, the internet responds with shrieks of woe about the impending end of human-penned prose. This cycle repeated last week when OpenAI launched ChatGPT--a version of GPT that can seemingly spit out any text, from a Mozart-styled piano piece to the history of London in the style of Dr. Seuss. The response on Twitter was unanimous: The college essay is doomed. Why slave over a paper when ChatGPT can write an original for you?