Why You Shouldn’t Use ChatGPT (And Not Because of “Academic Integrity”)

It's 2 AM, and you want to go to bed. You've spent the past few hours chipping away at the mountain of homework assigned by your lovely teachers. Deciphering your history textbook wasn't easy, toiling away at your math practice problems tested your patience, and your science teacher's endless slides threatened to fry your brain. However, you somehow managed to survive, and the only thing awaiting you should be some well-deserved sleep...

Alas, your sense of accomplishment is short lived.

Your English essay awaits you, and it's looking like this:

englis essay

topic: romeo and juliet - how the

- thier immaturity -> causes problem in book

- also,

In these trying times, the assistance of everyone's best friend, tutor, brother-in-arms, and accomplice–ChatGPT–will probably start to look like an enticing solution to all of your problems. You may rationalize using ChatGPT with excuses like...

"Why should we have to do all this work, when we can just ask ChatGPT?"

"ChatGPT isn't going anywhere!"

"Why do I need to learn about Romeo and Juliet? I'm going to major in %#&*#$#* economics!"

And I wholeheartedly agree! The things we learn at school can often feel unimportant, which makes expending effort feel meaningless.

But sadly, this is the world we live in, and we just have to deal with it. And the solution to these problems is not ChatGPT.

To start off, let's look at this from a technological perspective. ChatGPT is–for lack of a better word–stupid. ChatGPT doesn't possess true intelligence; it's really more like an upgraded version of autocorrect.

Autocorrect–the little bar above your iPhone keyboard that tries to correct any spelling errors you make while typing–is a remarkable piece of technology. Even if you fat-finger every single letter, autocorrect is usually able to figure out what word you were trying to type. This is because it was trained on the mistakes of others. Fat-fingering is a very common occurrence, so autocorrect was able to figure out how to correlate seemingly unrelated strings of letters with words in the dictionary. This is also why autocorrect struggles with slang–the word "skibidi" isn't commonly typed by people, so autocorrect hasn't been able to learn how to recognize it.

ChatGPT works by the same principle. It will look at the prompt you gave it and try to guess the words and sentences that are most likely to be the answer to it. It does this by analyzing trillions of sentences, finding patterns in human language, and guessing!

That's how ChatGPT works. It isn't some intelligent supercomputer that can think; it's simply a computer program that analyzes the trillions of sentences it is given, and uses this knowledge to guess what words follow certain words.

This is why ChatGPT is so great at high school stuff. ChatGPT was given an ocean of textbooks, study guides, and tests as a part of its training process. Since it had such a large input of high school level texts, it can accurately generate responses to high school level work.

This is also why ChatGPT is so terrible once you start asking it for more complicated stuff. Once you start asking about a niche subject or a recent event, it won't have enough resources to reference when trying to guess what words are most likely to answer your prompt. That's why ChatGPT has a tendency to hallucinate–a ChatGPT hallucination is a guess gone wrong.

This is why you shouldn't trust ChatGPT for anything that is even slightly difficult or niche; it will, without a doubt, make a mistake. Do you really trust a computer program that literally uses guesswork to answer your questions?

You wouldn't want someone to write your college essays by guessing what words are most likely to be on the average college essay, would you?

Now let's look at this from YOUR perspective. More specifically, I'm going to be talking about personal growth!!!

I know you've probably heard this a thousand times, and I know I'm being the devil's (teacher's) advocate here, so I'll keep it brief.

Your teachers are giving you so much work because they care about you! The goal isn't to learn about Romeo and Juliet's stupid love story. The goal is to learn critical thinking skills. To learn how to write essays. To learn how to put in effort into something you may not necessarily care about.

If you're able to power through a 2000 word English essay, you're going to have what it takes to power through a job application or a looming progress report.

Trust me, you're going to need these skills.

Alright, the obligatory it's for your own good section is over, and now I want to move on to my final point. It's about something everyone loves: money!

We all love money, and we all want to have lots of it. Alas, we live in a backwards capitalist society where money can only be earned through hard work.

Blasphemous, I know.

But it's the truth, and it means that–if you want to get a good job and earn lots of money–you're going to have to work for it. And ChatGPT will actively sabotage your life.

As I've stated previously, ChatGPT is stupid and using ChatGPT will mean that you won't be able to train up various important life skills. This means that–even if you ChatGPT your way to dream college–you're probably going to be miserable.

For starters, the things you learn in college are incredibly niche and incredibly difficult. ChatGPT is probably going to make countless small hallucinations on important facts–facts that will make or break your grade.

Furthermore, if you try to break away from your ChatGPT dependency, you're going to suffer a lot. High school was supposed to be a transitionary period–you were supposed to get used to actually trying in school as your teachers steadily increased your workload.

If you use ChatGPT in high school, you're blowing away 4 years of getting used to the real world and setting yourself up for a shotgun blast of "adulting" to the face.

I understand that working hard is hard. Trust me, I'm also a high schooler. I want to slack off too. I want to just lie in bed all day too. I want to not do my homework too,

But ChatGPT is far from the answer to the hardships you face as a high schooler. ChatGPT is a stopgap at best, and a pretty terrible one at that.

And yes, teachers will cite "academic integrity" as the main reason as to why you shouldn't use ChatGPT. They will say that it's "morally wrong" to use ChatGPT to cheat on your assignments.

But if ethics were enough to stop us stupid humans from doing bad things, our world would be a utopia.

Trying to convince a person to stop doing something because of "ethics" is like trying to explain theoretical physics to a brick wall.

But I believe that convincing a person to stop doing something because it's not effective and actively ruins your chances at earning big bucks is at least slightly feasible.

So here's what I'm trying to get at.

Don't do your homework for academic integrity. Do it for your future.

If it's 2 AM and you still have an English essay

, don't look to ChatGPT for a brief sense of relief.

Maybe you're expecting too much from yourself; it might be time to cut back on some extracurricular activities.

Maybe you've been spending too much time giggling at Instagram reels; take a look at your screen time and ask yourself if you should really be blaming the system.

Maybe you're just having a busy week. If so, believe in yourself! Just push through until the weekend comes and take the break you deserve. Might as well get used to powering through busy weeks, it's something that you will inevitably face for the rest of your life.

Whenever you're facing academic hardships, try to find the root cause of your problems. Start working on yourself, instead of looking for a shortcut.

I'm certain that your future self will be very grateful.