ChatGPT or cheating? A look at the AI product that could cause headaches for parents as kids head back to school
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- As kids return to the classroom and school gets back into the session, that comes with the challenges of homework and there's a new tool that they can access that has some controversy attached.
There's no doubt that by now, you've heard of ChatGPT. It may sound futuristic, but for your kids, the future is now.
Teachers and professors are aware and on the lookout for evidence of ChatGPT at work.
"That's a part of reality and some kids now about it and some don't -- but eventually they will all find out about it if it's useful," said Alex Fink, CEO of Otherweb.
Fink paid his dues in Silicon Valley and then branched out on his own to create Otherweb, a web aggregator. He says if you need a book report, ChatGPT can write one for you in seconds.
"If you're supposed to read the book and you didn't, then you're cheating, right?" Fink said. "You're just using ChatGPT to make sure the teacher doesn't know you didn't read the book.
Like a child using Google or Wikipedia, ChatGPT is kind of a superchild accessing the entire internet to come up with its material.
"Not everything on the internet is true," Fink said. "And therefore, that child has learned some things that are just complete nonsense."
But Fink says if you focus your inquiry to what you specifically need, ChatGPT can be really useful to explore a topic quickly and it's probably more efficient than any other methods out there.
For parents wanting to know if their children are using ChatGPT or similar software to help with their work, Fink says that you can look at their browser history.
Fink also says you shouldn't stick your head in the sand on this.
"This technology is out there," Fink said. "Everybody's going to be using it."
Open AI, he creator of ChatGPT, told Lead Investigator Andy Sheehan earlier this year that it was working on ways to identify ChatGPT's work.
That resulted in something called Classifier, which Open AI shut down last month when it couldn't even identify the AI work.
If used correctly, AI products like ChatGPT can indeed be useful and Fink says that as long as the search is specific enough, it can be an efficient research tool.