<aside> 📰 Emerging Stories:

• As of right now, ChatGPT is banned in NYC public schools.
• In a couple of months, the new version of ChatGPT is set to come out. It’s supposed to be WAY more advanced than the current version!
• Microsoft has purchased OpenAI and is now incorporating it into its programs, including Bing.
• More and more competitors emerge every day! </aside>

The Good

Used ethically, ChatGPT is an amazing tool. Students can use it to:

1. Generate a provisional outline
2. Get immediate feedback on their writing.
3. Get the ball rolling on an early draft
4. Conduct surface-level research

These ethical uses have one thing in common. They are all process-related. None of them uses ChatGPT to generate something that will simply be handed in for a grade.

In all of these examples, the student does the heavy lifting. And that’s how it should be.

But what happens when that doesn’t happen?

The Bad

As soon as ChatGPT came out, a question loomed: where did ChatGPT get its information?

It’s a good question. Answers are hard to come by.

I actually asked ChatGPT this very question. This is what it told me:

I am a language model trained by OpenAI. I was trained on a dataset of text data from the internet, which includes a diverse range of information sources such as books, articles, and websites. My knowledge is based on the text that was available in the dataset during my training, and my responses are generated based on patterns in that data. My knowledge cut-off date is 2021, so I may not have information on events or technologies that have emerged after that time. (OpenAI, 12 January 2023)