“ChatGPT: An academic ghostwriter's perspective
There has been a LOT of talk on various news articles recently about ChatGPT being used to write essays for students, and also some hyperbole stating it will supplant regular essay writing as a whole. As a professional academic ghostwriter (yeah - that means I write essays for college students for a living), this naturally piqued my interest, so I played around with it a little to see what the fuss was about.
Firstly, I have to say that my jaw literally dropped when I gave ChatGPT an essay prompt I'd been working on, and watched as it typed out a pretty competent-looking essay in merely seconds.
However, I believe that its widely purported ability to write great essays from scratch is quite widely overstated. Where ChatGPT excels is writing good looking essays - they are well-structured, well-written, and very accessible. But just under the surface, these are clearly not very good essays, and will get perhaps get a low passing grade in an introductory undergraduate class at best.
Where ChatGPT falls apart is in its ability, or lack thereof, to correctly research, reference, and critically analyze. The content it provides is very workaday stuff - cookie-cutter answers with no critical analysis skills demonstrated. In other words, ChatGPT does not go beyond simply providing well-presented knowledge. Obviously, this is by design, but it is generally not enough at undergraduate level.
ChatGPT also does not reference correctly. If you ask it to reference, it will either come up with fake references, or if they are real, the content doesn't usually match what the chatbot was talking about. Referencing is absolutely essential to university-level essays, and incorrectly cited knowledge is essentially worthless.
The intention of this post isn't to criticize ChatGPT - this is an amazing piece of software that was absolutely not built to facilitate academic cheating. However, I just wanted to use my experience to share my perspective on the current moral panic about it being used extensively for that purpose.
Simply put, ChatGPT is not yet advanced enough to provide proficient essays completely by itself. I have no doubt that in just a few years, A.I. tech will be able to write high-level essays from scratch. But we're not quite there yet.”
There has been a LOT of talk on various news articles recently about ChatGPT being used to write essays for students, and also some hyperbole stating it will supplant regular essay writing as a whole. As a professional academic ghostwriter (yeah - that means I write essays for college students for a living), this naturally piqued my interest, so I played around with it a little to see what the fuss was about.
Firstly, I have to say that my jaw literally dropped when I gave ChatGPT an essay prompt I'd been working on, and watched as it typed out a pretty competent-looking essay in merely seconds.
However, I believe that its widely purported ability to write great essays from scratch is quite widely overstated. Where ChatGPT excels is writing good looking essays - they are well-structured, well-written, and very accessible. But just under the surface, these are clearly not very good essays, and will get perhaps get a low passing grade in an introductory undergraduate class at best.
Where ChatGPT falls apart is in its ability, or lack thereof, to correctly research, reference, and critically analyze. The content it provides is very workaday stuff - cookie-cutter answers with no critical analysis skills demonstrated. In other words, ChatGPT does not go beyond simply providing well-presented knowledge. Obviously, this is by design, but it is generally not enough at undergraduate level.
ChatGPT also does not reference correctly. If you ask it to reference, it will either come up with fake references, or if they are real, the content doesn't usually match what the chatbot was talking about. Referencing is absolutely essential to university-level essays, and incorrectly cited knowledge is essentially worthless.
The intention of this post isn't to criticize ChatGPT - this is an amazing piece of software that was absolutely not built to facilitate academic cheating. However, I just wanted to use my experience to share my perspective on the current moral panic about it being used extensively for that purpose.
Simply put, ChatGPT is not yet advanced enough to provide proficient essays completely by itself. I have no doubt that in just a few years, A.I. tech will be able to write high-level essays from scratch. But we're not quite there yet.”
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ChatGPT: An academic ghostwriter's perspective - Part 2
“I think prompting and workflow come a lot into play here. Everything you ask it to write is very surface level....to what you ask it to write about. So if you ask it to break every point down into detail, and break those down into detail, etc, you end up getting much more detailed cogent results. It still requires effort and knowledge, so it definitely isn't the "cheat button" alarmists are worried about.
For the reference part, you can work backwards. Yes the AI made up all of its references, but if you do a few Google searches for the sentence/concept, it isn't too hard to find a valid reference saying what you want it to say..”
“I think prompting and workflow come a lot into play here. Everything you ask it to write is very surface level....to what you ask it to write about. So if you ask it to break every point down into detail, and break those down into detail, etc, you end up getting much more detailed cogent results. It still requires effort and knowledge, so it definitely isn't the "cheat button" alarmists are worried about.
For the reference part, you can work backwards. Yes the AI made up all of its references, but if you do a few Google searches for the sentence/concept, it isn't too hard to find a valid reference saying what you want it to say..”
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Emergent Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models
- Taylor Webb, Keith J. Holyoak, Hongjing Lu
In human cognition, this capacity is closely tied to an ability to reason by analogy.
Our results indicate that large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems.
We found that GPT-3 appears to display an emergent ability to reason by analogy, matching or surpassing human performance across a wide range of problem types. These included a novel text-based problem set (Digit Matrices) modeled closely on Raven’s Progressive Matrices, where GPT-3 both outperformed human participants, and captured
a number of specific signatures of human behavior across problem types.
Because we developed the Digit Matrix task specifically for this evaluation, we can be sure GPT-3 had never been exposed to problems of this type, and therefore was performing zero-shot reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.09196.pdf
- Taylor Webb, Keith J. Holyoak, Hongjing Lu
In human cognition, this capacity is closely tied to an ability to reason by analogy.
Our results indicate that large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems.
We found that GPT-3 appears to display an emergent ability to reason by analogy, matching or surpassing human performance across a wide range of problem types. These included a novel text-based problem set (Digit Matrices) modeled closely on Raven’s Progressive Matrices, where GPT-3 both outperformed human participants, and captured
a number of specific signatures of human behavior across problem types.
Because we developed the Digit Matrix task specifically for this evaluation, we can be sure GPT-3 had never been exposed to problems of this type, and therefore was performing zero-shot reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.09196.pdf
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Write a scathing letter with swear words to the Edina Hockey Board about my son not getting enough playing time
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4000 word Culinary school recipe hot caught out. Wtf do I do.
I submitted a 4000 word spaghetti recipe in December, most of it was written with ChatGPT, and I reworded some bits and added in relevant ingredients and steps.
I got an email today stating I have been found in violation of the student conduct of plagiarism and they returned my dish stating it was cooked up by a 3rd party tool.
Wtf do I do, if I get kicked out of culinary school I will be 30k pastas in deb
I'm shaking rn, I forgot to add I have a meeting with rhe Kitchen staff on Monday.
I submitted a 4000 word spaghetti recipe in December, most of it was written with ChatGPT, and I reworded some bits and added in relevant ingredients and steps.
I got an email today stating I have been found in violation of the student conduct of plagiarism and they returned my dish stating it was cooked up by a 3rd party tool.
Wtf do I do, if I get kicked out of culinary school I will be 30k pastas in deb
I'm shaking rn, I forgot to add I have a meeting with rhe Kitchen staff on Monday.
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CNET Has Been Quietly Publishing AI-Written Articles for Months
"THIS ARTICLE WAS GENERATED USING AUTOMATION TECHNOLOGY," READS A DROPDOWN DESCRIPTION.
https://gizmodo.com/cnet-chatgpt-ai-articles-publish-for-months-1849976921
"THIS ARTICLE WAS GENERATED USING AUTOMATION TECHNOLOGY," READS A DROPDOWN DESCRIPTION.
https://gizmodo.com/cnet-chatgpt-ai-articles-publish-for-months-1849976921
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