Is it Ethical for College Students to Use ChatGPT?
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, college students no longer have to produce original text for their courses. Artificial intelligence can do it for them.
But should this type of technology be allowed in schools? If so, are there ethical boundaries for how to use it? As you write papers, discussion board posts, and lab reports it’s important to know how AI can help you — and, of course, where it can hurt.
The Good
ChatGPT is great for brainstorming. If you’re experiencing writer’s block or need help getting started on a paper, chatbots can quickly churn out ideas in mass quantities. This material essentially jumpstarts your project by providing options and perspectives you might not come up with on your own. Of course, using AI as a starting point requires you to fully synthesize the idea and create the result on your own.
If you struggle with organizing your essays, ChatGPT is helpful for structuring projects. With the right prompt, ChatGPT will break down your project into manageable parts. This prevents stressing about massive assignments and leaves you with more time to work. As a supplementary tool, AI has the potential to streamline your schoolwork for maximum efficiency.
The Bad
As a college student, your role entails building your skillset for a future career. If you choose to depend on ChatGPT to write your assignments, it wastes opportunities to gain experience or learn from the material. For courses that assign exams and papers, using AI to write may leave you unprepared for the test portions. Ultimately, the more you rely on ChatGPT instead of your own skills to complete work, the less ready you’ll be for a future after college.
Now that chatbots have been available for a couple of years, many professors are able to spot the difference between a student-written paper and one composed by AI. Most likely, the software you use to turn in assignments online has a built-in ChatGPT plagiarism checker that can detect most chatbot-generated material. If you get caught, there may be consequences regarding academic integrity. Check your school’s policy on on acceptable AI usage.
The Ugly
AI should not be used for academic research — and here’s why: ChatGPT was trained using a Large Language Model, meaning its purpose is to emulate speech and text patterns to sound like a human. Although it was trained on a large dataset of publicly available sources, ChatGPT wasn’t storing the facts and information those texts were about. Instead, it was learning language patterns and observing how the information was communicated. When prompted, ChatGPT recalls how relevant texts were written, not the actual knowledge.
This makes ChatGPT unreliable for multiple reasons. The information ChatGPT provides isn’t necessarily accurate, especially in specialized fields of research. Chatbots don’t see true or false statements — just relevant language for your prompt. For any kind of AI-generated writing, it’s always best to fact-check for possible errors.
ChatGPT cannot cite its sources properly, which makes academic research difficult. Chatbots aren’t storing where each fact they produce comes from. When prompted to list its sources, ChatGPT will often “hallucinate” or come up with fake citations that don’t exist. For college students, this abandons academic integrity because the information came from someone, but there isn’t a way to credit them properly. For that reason, most would consider using AI-generated work as plagiarism.
Simply put, if a chatbot is writing the paper, that means you aren’t. To ensure the most accurate and academically integral outcome, it’s best not to use AI for your actual writing.
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