Artificial Intelligence is here and stronger than ever. On Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT, an OpenAI website, was released and has been increasing in popularity at a rapid pace. The core function of this site is to mimic human conversations, but it is not limited to that. ChatGPT is able to compose music, answer test questions, write a poem and play tic tac toe for example.

     Despite its wide variety of capabilities, ChatGPT is not without its limitations. According to the public, ChatGPT is capable of creating responses to prompts that sound plausible but contain untrue information. ChatGPT also has limited knowledge for events that occurred after 2021. Along with this, ChatGPT is unable to express political views or opinions. Even with these limitations, ChatGPT has still been able to obtain over a million users in the past couple months. But this amount of users is dangerous, due to the fact that ChatGPT mixes fact with fiction, which could potentially start the spread of untrue information. 

 According to Business Insider, many jobs are at risk due to the introduction of ChatGPT. Some of these jobs are tech jobs, media jobs, legal industry jobs, teachers and finance jobs.

      One of the main concerns from teachers is that they won’t be able to tell if a piece of work is AI generated or not. But ChatGPT just recently introduced a new tool that will try and determine the likelihood that a section of text is AI generated. Hellgate High School English teacher Jessica Gustafson has her own opinion on it. When asked if she trusts her students with ChatGPT, she does but said, “In a moment of stress, a human might be tempted to ask a robot to write an essay for them.” 

     Till this point, Gustafson has been doing essays online, but after understanding the capabilities of ChatGPT she made the decision that “everything will be handwritten from now on!”

     Gustafson along with many other teachers across the country are realizing the harm that ChatGPT will have on the future generations. When asked what she believes can be done about the use of ChatGPT in school, Gustafson said, “Help students love learning so they don’t want to use a robot to do their homework.”

     As for students, ChatGPT could not be more ideal. But some students are aware of the risks. Junior Lily Stearns says “I’ve used it once or twice to get more information on some topics.” Stearns is aware that using ChatGPT could be detrimental to her learning, so she only uses it to get more information on necessary things. “I know that some of the information might be inaccurate so I use it with caution.” Stearns says. This isn’t the common answer though, a majority of students will use ChatGPT whenever possible, even though the effects may be more long term. 

     ChatGPT is an achievement in the field of natural language processing and a symbol of how far we have come with technology. Its ability to generate human-like text and perform a wide range of natural language tasks makes it a useful tool for both industry professionals and researchers.  So, are we seeing the beginning of an age of AI?