By Sofia K. ’23

On November 30th, 2022, ChatGPT was launched initially free of charge to the public, with plans to monetize later. Within two months, the company reached 100 million users. For reference, Google took over a year to reach that number of users, so this puts its rapid popularity into perspective. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that can essentially do any task asked of it. For example, ChatGPT can write an essay analyzing the ethical implications of AI, and the bot can also write the code for a video game. While it has limitations and can sometimes make mistakes, the bot is extremely useful. It can complete written tasks at a speed that is much faster than any person, which shows the benefits of the bot. This leads to significant ethical implications, especially around education and school. Since the bot is AI, and all of the text is auto-generated, people are still determining whether using the bot is considered plagiarism.

Furthermore, schools are noticing that ChatGPT is something students use to complete assignments. In addition to ChatGPT being a form of cheating, it also causes students to not benefit from the assignments that are supposed to help them learn. The bot indirectly promotes dishonesty and unfairness towards teachers and the students who are still putting in effort and doing assignments with integrity. While there are many ethical implications ChatGPT brings up, I see the values of honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity as being the most prevalent values to continue discussing as it relates to the future of education. With the rapid advancements of AI platforms such as ChatGPT, we need to think about how schools, and other places where technology is present, should navigate the future of technology usage, ensuring that all work is of good quality but completed honestly.