All the unexpected ways ChatGPT is infiltrating students’ lives

Zach Berger, 20, was stumped trying to think of a gift for his girlfriend. Her birthday, the holidays, their anniversary and Valentine’s Day all came in a span of about three months. “So toward the end, I was running out of ideas,” he said.

Berger, a native of Rye Brook, N.Y., turned to ChatGPT for help.

“Any good ideas for valentines day presents for a 20 year old girlfriend who loves Taylor Swift, BoyGenius, diet coke, cold water, romcoms, and popits?” he typed.

Berger, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, had experimented with AI already. A film minor, he had heard during talks in the department that the technology could be used to fuel creativity. He turned to DALL-E, a text-to-image generator, to see if it might spur ideas for a screenplay or concept for a film.

He tried some out-there prompts, asking for a hyper-realistic oil painting of the apocalypse, as well as “A small family of three traveling on vacation who ended up in hell by accident,” with 1970s-style clothing and suitcases, demons and flames in the background, in the style of filmmaker Wes Anderson.

The technology didn’t quite get faces and hands right in some of the results, he said, but the bizarre and absurd images did get him thinking about possible plotlines, and he liked the apocalyptic one so much he made it the screen saver for his computer.

Berger used AI for serious things, too. He tried using it to help him study — such as checking his analysis of the important points of dense court cases he was reading in political science classes — but found it would sometimes just make up information. He asked ChatGPT to refine ideas for a topic for a Model United Nations event he was helping to plan, but it provided some facts that were glaringly wrong, he said.

Turns out, though, ChatGPT was very good at romantic gift ideas. It coughed up eight Valentine’s Day suggestions, including tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. (“That was not going to happen,” Berger said.)

He chose custom Diet Coke bottles and a cozy sweater. “It was a good gift!” he said.

When Angel, 18, first heard about ChatGPT, he thought, That’s cool — that’ll make stuff a lot easier!

At the same time, he worried about the impact that AI might have on the world. “This seems like this could go very badly really, really quickly,” said the high school student from Ontario, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name to avoid potential academic repercussions.

But like many other students he knows at his high school, he couldn’t resist. “It’s really easy to use, so everyone just goes for it,” he said.

Angel uses it daily. He asks ChatGPT to check the grammar after he has written an essay. He uses it to help clarify things. “When I don’t understand a concept, I’ll be like: ‘Hey, can you explain this? Because I don’t really want to go talk to the teacher, and I know you can probably explain it better right now.’”

And sometimes, when he realizes an assignment is due the next day, he asks ChatGPT to do it. The technology doesn’t work for everything — with a personal essay it would be obvious that he didn’t write it, he said.

But ChatGPT can help him improve his writing, he said. When he entered the rubric his English teacher uses, ChatGPT could tell him which paragraphs would get top marks and which wouldn’t.

For computer science assignments, he can just turn in the code it spits out. It also proofs his work: “Sometimes I’ll forget the smallest thing, a comma or something, and it’ll ruin the whole code. So instead of sitting there for hours looking for a little dot or a comma, it’ll do it for me, and it’s just 10 times easier.”

So much is easier. So much is faster. “I should be doing my work, but I don’t have to do my work as much,” he said.

Mark Lomas, 17, was feeling stuck — and sliding toward a deadline.

He had less than a week to file a story for the Akins High School newspaper about the growing popularity of artificial-intelligence tools, but he couldn’t think of a way to begin. Everyone at his Texas school had been talking about ChatGPT for weeks. Could he find something new to say?

Then Lomas had an idea. “Why not,” he said to his friend and co-writer Roberto Ramirez, “ask ChatGPT?”

Ramirez told him that would be “really ironic.” But both teens agreed to give it a try.

“Write a 200 word News story about A.I.,” Lomas typed into his computer.

ChatGPT responded with a mini-story that highlighted its own potential — for example, improving the accuracy of medical diagnoses — and its drawbacks, including the possibility that “it could be used … to manipulate people’s thoughts and behavior.” Drawing inspiration from ChatGPT’s evenhanded treatment of the subject, Lomas and Ramirez decided to survey students and faculty about the technology’s pros and cons.

They interviewed a teacher who said he was unconcerned that students might use ChatGPT to cheat — as well as a student who, speaking anonymously, confessed to using the technology to write an English essay, for which he earned a 100.

“Survey respondents admitted to using AI to write essays and brainstorm ideas,” Lomas and Ramirez wrote. “The limit is only human imagination.”

Lomas, a junior with a passion for technology news, has since used ChatGPT at least once a week, mostly to research homework assignments. He said ChatGPT is easier and faster than sifting through search engine results.

Recently, Lomas wanted to understand why GOP legislators are proposing and passing a historic wave of legislation restricting transgender rights. ChatGPT explained, Lomas said, that many Republicans believe people’s biological sex as assigned at birth should determine their gender for the rest of their lives — a notion that helped frame his essay, he said.

He said that ChatGPT has proved accurate so far and that he is unconcerned the bot might provide him incorrect information. Lomas said he never asks ChatGPT to write school assignments for him because that would be plagiarism.

He has noticed a handful of friends finding nonacademic uses for artificial-intelligence tools. One friend, feeling sad, asked Character.ai, an AI-driven website that lets users “create characters and talk to them,” how she could learn to be happy — “and it gave her some good advice” about appreciating little, everyday joys, he said.

But Lomas worries about the future. He wants to go into journalism, and he fears ChatGPT threatens the profession. He imagines a world in which nobody reads articles anymore, relying instead on ChatGPT-generated summaries of the news. That could drive media organizations out of business, Lomas said.

Still, he understands the temptation to skip reading long articles.

“For now, I’m still clicking through [ChatGPT results] to news articles,” he said. “Until it gets good enough, anyway.”

Rebekah Davidson, 23, was surprised by how chatty her chatbot could be.

She once asked My AI about some historical figures and then, out of curiosity, what it thought of the character Albus Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series.

That opened up a whole can of worms, she said. The Macon, Ga., native disagreed with the bot’s response that the wizard was a complex character who might not always be right but served as a symbol of hope and courage. When she wrote that she didn’t think some of Dumbledore’s actions were justified, the chatbot responded with comments such as, “I can see why you might feel that way” or, “That’s a good point.”

“Hold up,” she thought, “this is like an actual human is talking to me.”

“I was weirded out that it seemed to try to validate my opinion,” she said, “while also trying to point out why it disagreed with me.”

Another time, Davidson, who just graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a bachelor’s degree in history, typed into My AI that she was feeling kind of down. At the time, she didn’t want to burden family or friends, she said.

The chatbot “replied something like: ‘I’m sorry to hear that. How can I help?’”

The question was not entirely unwelcome. There might be a future for AI in mental health, she said, for introverted people who may feel more comfortable talking to a chatbot than a human. “I could definitely see the appeal.”

Milan Basak-Odisio, 15, learned about ChatGPT by watching videos on Tik Tok. Users there were boasting that, relying on the software, they churned out two-page essays in 10 minutes or less. Basak-Odisio, who attends the School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas, gave it a whirl.

His chemistry teacher had asked him to write a short summary of the properties of acids and bases. He asked ChatGPT what to say.

“It wasn’t really useful because it spat out only two paragraphs,” Basak-Odisio said. “So I could have done it on my own.”

Other experiences with ChatGPT proved similarly unsatisfying.

Confronting an English assignment that asked him to imagine life as a professional author, Basak-Odisio asked ChatGPT what it is like to work at publishing company HarperCollins. The chatbot, Basak-Odisio said, replied with a glowing advertisement for the company.

“It said it was very welcoming and diverse. It didn’t give me anything negative about it,” Basak-Odisio said. He wound up using some of what ChatGPT provided, although he switched around the word order and substituted synonyms to avoid plagiarism or cheating charges. He also added his own information.

The teen gave the tech one more try for a history essay on neoliberalism.

ChatGPT provided a string of ideas about the negative and positive sides of neoliberalism, Basak-Odisio said, which he then organized into paragraphs. It was somewhat helpful, he said, but he much prefers using his own brain.

“It feels more like my work that way — I feel more original,” he said. “Overall I think it’s a bad thing for schools because it’s really easy to not learn anything and just ask it a question, and submit it with little of your own knowledge.”

Basak-Odisio, whose favorite subject is math and who wants to pursue a career as a computer programmer, said he sometimes wishes ChatGPT didn’t exist. He thinks it will foster student laziness.

Now Basak-Odisio will use it only, he said, if he has procrastinated too much and is facing an impossible deadline.

“If it is the day or night before, and I want to finish something as quickly as possible — ” he said, trailing off. “But,” he added, “I want to be better than that.”