ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot software that was developed by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. The company is made up of 375 employees and Open AI Chief Executive Sam Altman thinks that OpenAI has managed to pull together the most talent-dense researchers and engineers in the field of AI.

The primary purpose for this chatbot was for customer service but others have used it for other purposes as well, specifically for schoolwork. Types of schoolwork that people commonly use ChatGPT for are writing essays or stories/poems, writing code, translating languages, debugging, suggesting chords or lyrics for musical purposes, and even asking for ideas for holiday presents. It does it all.

The chatbot uses Natural Language Processing which simply refers to the department of artificial intelligence. Chat GPT uses a mixture of websites, articles, and textbooks in order to respond to the user. ChatGPT is currently free to use for everybody on a mobile and on a computer but there is no official use yet for those that have an Android.

ChatGPT has been reported as the fastest-growing app of all time. In January of 2023, only two months after its launch, the app had over 100 million users. To give perspective, it took TikTok, the previous fastest-growing app, nine months, and it took Instagram thirty months in order to reach 100 million users.

ChatGPT expects an income of about $200 million for 2023 and for the income to balloon to over $1 billion by the end of 2024. Approximately 30 million people per day use ChatGPT, which is unbelievable.

Obviously, the app isn’t in its full form yet, but it is still very impressive to see how many people have used this app in the short amount of time that ChatGPT has been launched.  As Elon Musk said himself, “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”

Microsoft has promised to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI in order to power its company. They have been invested in ChatGPT from the beginning. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion and then $2 billion throughout the upcoming years. Microsoft used their partnership as an opportunity to launch their own search engine, Bing, and improve their company.

BingAI ChatGPT was finally launched on February 7, 2023, and uses lots of next-gen OpenAI language models with the primary ability to search. But Sam Altman thinks otherwise, “It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.” So the future for ChatGPT is questionable, but the success that it has had in the first few months is undeniable.

Even though ChatGPT has been used by so many people and has been so successful, just like anything, it has some limitations. For starters, ChatGPT no longer allows users to ask it about its feelings because people were weirded out by the previous responses that they were getting when they were talking about feelings/emotions.

Also, ChatGPT might not know everything that you want it to know because it isn’t a search browser and it’s simply an AI that is supposed to recognize patterns in text throughout the internet. So even if the answers that it provides may sound logical and credible, they may just be completely wrong and a waste of an ask. Sometimes the chatbot itself will say that it will be unable to answer your question. School administrators themselves have been concerned with their student’s answers because most are using ChatGPT for the answers and many of the answers that they are being given are incorrect.

This is why most teachers, including teachers here at Birmingham Community Charter High School, are constantly making sure that their students aren’t cheating/getting questions wrong/or asking the chatbot for too much help. Even if they get whatever they use the chatbot for correct, the teacher can check the website to see if the student copied word for word and cheated in order to complete the assignment.

If students do the assignment incorrectly, not only do they get caught/taken points off for cheating, but they also just wasted a lot of time chatting with the chatbot in order to try and get a plausible answer–yet in the end, not get one anyways. Sure, any student can cheat off of ChatGPT, but in the end, it won’t be worth it.

However, many have seen that the ChatGPT chatbot has done profoundly better on assignments, essays, or tests compared to most students when they try assignments on their own. For example, a programmer from Google tested ChatGPT on a number of tests to see how it would compare to other students.

The test results are as follows: 70% on the United States Medical Licensing Examination, 70% on a bar exam for lawyers, 40th percentile on the Law School Admission Test, 9 out of 15 on the Multi-state Professional Responsibility Examination, and 78% N.Y. state high school chemistry exam.

I’m pretty sure you’re noticing the trend of ChatGPT by now. ChatGPT gets just about the average when it comes to passing, but does a lot better than all of those students who fail. According to California School Districts, at least one in three students failed at least one class during their learning tenure and about 5 out of 10 received a D or F in at least one class.

Imagine how many students there are in California taking K-12 classes? That is a lot of students.

My final thoughts about ChatGPT are that students should continue doing all of their work on their own or simply ask a parent or teacher if they need help with anything. Otherwise, you’re going to be relying on a chatbot to do your work for the rest of your life and you’ll most likely get average grades at best.